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Colour Quotes

Browse 1161 quotes about Colour.

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Colour Quotes

“There is silver blue, sky blue and thunder blue. Every colour holds within it a soul, which makes me happy or repels me, and which acts as a stimulus. To a person who has no art in him, colours are colours, tones tones...and that is all. All their consequences for the human spirit, which range between heaven to hell, just go unnoticed.”

HumansPersonsArtSoulSpiritHeavenHellSkyConsequenceBlueRangeToneColourSilverThunderHuman SpiritStimulusMake Me HappyUnnoticedBlue Sky
Author:Emil Nolde
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“Colour is uncontainable. It effortlessly reveals the limits of language and evades our best attempts to impose a rational order on it To work with colour is to become acutely aware of the insufficiency of language and theory – which is both disturbing and pleasurable.”

OrderLanguageTheoryLimitsRationalColourDisturbingInsufficiency
Book:Gary Hume: British Pavilion, XLVIII Venice Biennale, 13 June-7 Novermer 1999
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“Every generation has its war. I have just been reminded of mine. It ended in 1989, 43 years after it began, the longest war Britain fought and certainly the most expensive. Its climax was total victory. Yet there was no parade, no medals, no colours hung in cathedrals. The Cold War saw no battles and cost almost no blood. Where there is no blood there is no glory and hence no history. Asked What did you do in the war, Daddy?, I could say only that I paid my taxes and left it at that.”

YearsWarLeftSawsGenerationsBloodMinesColdVictoryBattleCostTaxesGloryPaidColourBritainExpensiveHungCold WarDaddyMedalParadesCathedralsClimax
Author:Simon Jenkins
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“It hardly needs explaining at length, I think, how much authority or beauty is added to style by the timely use of proverbs. In the first place who does not see what dignity they confer on style by their antiquity alone?... And so to interweave adages deftly and appropriately is to make the language as a whole glitter with sparkles from Antiquity, please us with the colours of the art of rhetoric, gleam with jewel-like words of wisdom, and charm us with titbits of wit and humour.”

ThinkingNeedsFirstsDoeArtWholeUseLanguageStyleHumourWords Of WisdomPleaseAuthorityDignityWitCharmColourLengthRhetoricJewelsExplainingAdagesGlitterAntiquitySparkleGleamTimely
Author:Desiderius Erasmus
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“Wherever men are noble, they love bright colour; and wherever they can live healthily, bright colour is given them—in sky, sea, flowers, and living creatures.”

MenGivenSeaSkyFlowerCreaturesNobleColourLiving Creatures
Book:Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure Among the Alps, and in the Scotland and England which My Father Knew
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“In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.”

IfsThinkingKnowsHumansLittlesEndsPoliticalTurnsBeliefReligiousSecretCollegeStandardsEvidenceErrorsColourInterpretationAcademicHierarchyGreat SuccessBelief SystemsDead Ends
Book:Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
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“Now, among the heresies that are spoken in this matter is the habit of calling a grey day a "colourless" day. Grey is a colour, and can be a very powerful and pleasing colour.... A grey clouded sky is indeed a canopy between us and the sun; so is a green tree, if it comes to that. But the grey umbrellas differ as much as the green in their style and shape, in their tint and tilt. One day may be grey like steel, and another grey like dove’s plumage. One may seem grey like the deathly frost, and another grey like the smoke of substantial kitchens.”

IfsMayMatterSeemsPowerfulSunTreeSkyStyleHabitCallingOne DayShapesGreenSmokeKitchenColourSteelGreyHeresyVery PowerfulDoveFrostUmbrellaCloudedTiltGreen TreesCanopy
Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“[V]ariety of climate should always go with stability of abode.... an Englishman’s house is not only his castle; it is his fairy castle. Clouds and colours of every varied dawn and eve are perpetually touching and turning it from clay to gold, or from gold to ivory. There is a line of woodland beyond a corner of my garden which is literally different on every one of the three hundred and sixty-five days. Sometimes it seems as near as a hedge, and sometimes as far as a faint and fiery evening cloud.”

ShouldDifferentSometimesSeemsThreeHouseLinesFiveHundredGardenGoldClimateCloudsCornersWeatherEveningDawnColourFairyTouchingStabilitySixtyClayCastlesEnglishmenFieryIvoryAbodeWoodland
Author:Gilbert K. Chesterton
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“Shut your eyes, wait, think of nothing. Now, open them ... one sees nothing but a great coloured undulation. What then? An irradiation and glory of colour. This is what a picture should give us ... an abyss in which the eye is lost, a secret germination, a coloured state of grace ... loose conciousness. Descend with the painter into the dim tangled roots of things, and rise again from them in colours, be steeped in the light of them.”

ThinkingGivingShouldStatesLightEyeLostWaitingSecretGraceColorGloryRootsPainterColourAbyssTangled
Author:Paul Cezanne
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“The truth... When they have a similar structure to and are organized in as truthful a way as nature. When I look out of the window, then truth for me is the way nature shows itself in its various tones, colours and proportions. That's a truth and has its own correctness. This little slice of nature, and in fact any given piece of nature, represents to me an ongoing challenge, and is a model for my paintings.”

WayLooksLittlesArtFactsShowsGivenChallengesPiecesPaintingModelsWindowStructureVariousToneOrganizedColourProportionTruthfulOngoingCorrectness
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“The first colour charts were unsystematic. They were based directly on commercial colour samples. They were still related to Pop Art. In the canvases that followed, the colours were chosen arbitrarily and drawn by chance. Then, 180 tones were mixed according to a given system and drawn by chance to make four variations of 180 tones. But after that the number 180 seemed too arbitrary to me, so I developed a system based on a number of rigorously defined tones and proportions.”

FirstsArtStillsGivenChanceNumbersFourPaintingPopsChosenDefinedRelatedToneColourProportionArbitraryVariationSamplePop Art
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Based on mixtures of the three primary colours, along with black and white, I come up with a certain number of possible colours and, by multiplying these by two or four, I obtain a definite number of colour fields that I multiply yet again by two, etc. But the complete realization of this project demands a great deal of time and work.”

ArtTwoCertainThreeBlackWhiteDealsNumbersFourFieldsPaintingDemandProjectsCome UpRealizationPrimariesColourEtcBlack And WhiteDefiniteMixturesMultiplying
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Grey. It makes no statement whatever; it evokes neither feelings nor associations: it is really neither visible nor invisible. Its inconspicuousness gives it the capacity to mediate, to make visible, in a positively illusionistic way, like a photograph. It has the capacity that no other colour has, to make 'nothing' visible.”

WayGivingArtFeelingsPaintingCapacityPhotographInvisibleStatementsColourVisibleAssociationGreyPositivelyEvoke
Book:Gerhard Richter: October 18, 1977
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“To me, grey is the welcome and only possible equivalent for indifference, noncommitment, absence of opinion, absence of shape. But grey, like formlessness and the rest, can be real only as an idea, and so all I can do is create a colour nuance that means grey but is not it. The painting is then a mixture of grey as a fiction and grey as a visible, designated area of colour.”

MeanArtI CanIdeasRealCan DoFictionOpinionPaintingShapesAreasAbsenceWelcomeIndifferenceColourVisibleBeing RealGreyMixturesNuance
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“I believe I am looking for rightness. My work has so much to do with reality that I wanted to have a corresponding rightness. That excludes painting in imitation. In nature everything is always right: the structure is right, the proportions are good, the colours fit the forms. If you imitate that in painting, it becomes false.”

IfsBelieveArtRealityWantedFormI BelievePaintingFitStructureColourProportionImitationCorresponding
Book:Gerhard Richter: text : writings, interviews and letters, 1961-2007
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“The grey is certainly inspired by the photo-paintings, and, of course, it's related to the fact that I think grey is an important colour - the ideal colour for indifference, fence-sitting, keeping quiet, despair. In other words, for states of being and situations that affect one, and for which one would like to find a visual expression.”

ThinkingArtImportantStatesFactsCoursesSituationPaintingExpressionQuietDespairSittingIdealsInspiredIndifferenceRelatedVisualsColourGreyFenceKeeping Quiet
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“I first came up with the idea for the colour-chart pictures back in 1966, and my preoccupation with the topic culminated in 1974 with a painting that consisted of 4,096 colour fields. Initially I was attracted by the typical Pop Art aestheticism of using standard colour-sample cards; I preferred the unartistic, tasteful and secular illustration of the different tones to the paintings of Albers, Bill, Calderara, Lohse, etc.”

FirstsArtIdeasDifferentFieldsPaintingStandardsBillsPopsCardsToneColourEtcSecularTypicalTopicsIllustrationPreoccupationSamplePop Art
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“Turning to the colour-classification methodology: The starting point are the four pure colours red, yellow, green and blue; their in-between shades and scales of brightness result in colour schemes containing 16, 64, 256 and 1,024 shades. More colours would be pointless because it wouldn't be possible to distinguish between them clearly.”

ArtWould BeResultsFourPaintingPureRedBlueGreenStartingScalesColourShadeYellowSchemesPointlessBrightnessStarting PointContainingMethodologyClassificationColour Red
Book:Gerhard Richter: writings 1961-2007
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“Well, the beginning is actually quite easy, because I can still be quite free about the way I handle things - colours, shapes. And so a picture emerges that may look quite good for a while, so airy and colourful and new. But that will only last for a day at most, at which point it starts to look cheap and fake. And then the real work begins - changing, eradicating, starting again, and so on, until it's done.”

WayWellsLooksMayArtStillsI CanRealDoneLastsEasyPaintingShapesStartingHandleFakeColourBecause I CanAiryReal WorkColourful
Author:Gerhard Richter
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“Democritus sometimes does away with what appears to the senses, and says that none of these appears according to truth but only according to opinion: the truth in real things is that there are atoms and void. 'By convention sweet', he says, 'by convention bitter, by convention hot, by convention cold, by convention colour: but in reality atoms and void.'”

DoeRealSometimesRealityScienceOpinionSweetColdHotSensesBitterColourAtomsConventionsVoidReal Things
Author:Sextus Empiricus
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“In acute diseases the physician must conduct his inquiries in the following way. First he must examine the face of the patient, and see whether it is like the faces of healthy people, and especially whether it is like its usual self. Such likeness will be the best sign, and the greatest unlikeness will be the most dangerous sign. The latter will be as follows. Nose sharp, eyes hollow, temples sunken, ears cold and contracted with their lobes turned outwards, the skin about the face hard and tense and parched, the colour of the face as a whole being yellow or black.”

PeopleWayFirstsSelfHardWholeEyeFacesBlackDangerousColdHealthyDiseaseSkinsEarsPatientFollowingNosesColourBeing The BestLatterTemplesYellowUsualPhysiciansInquiryHollowTenseSharp Eyes
Author:Hippocrates
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“The near end of the street was rather dark and had mostly vegetable shops. Abundance of vegetables - piles of white and green fennel, like celery, and great sheaves of young, purplish, sea-dust-coloured artichokes . . . long strings of dried figs, mountains of big oranges, scarlet large peppers, a large slice of pumpkin, a great mass of colours and vegetable freshness. . . .”

LongEndsBigsYoungDarkWhiteDarknessSeaStreetsMountainMassGreenDustColourAbundanceShopsStringsVegetablesOrangeFreshnessScarletPeppersPumpkinFigsCeleryArtichokes
Book:Sea and Sardinia
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