Colour Quotes

There is something terribly morbid in the modern sympathy with pain. One should sympathise with the colour, the beauty, the joy of life. The less said about life's sores the better. 
Oscar Wilde 

White... is not a mere absence of colour; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black... God paints in many colours; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. 
Gilbert K. Chesterton 

Any colour - so long as it's black. 
Henry Ford 

It doesn't matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I'm a woman or a man. 
John Lennon 

The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love colour the most. 
John Ruskin 

If I'm feeling down in the dumps, or like I need a pop of colour, I'll put on MAC's Lipstick in Lady Danger. I discovered red lipstick when I did the Oscar season: Chanel sent me one and I realised how classic and glamorous it can be. 
Chloe Sevigny 

Shadow is a colour as light is, but less brilliant; light and shadow are only the relation of two tones. 
Paul Cezanne 

I always do book signings with the same blue pen. That way, if I add a personalised message to a book I've already signed, it'll be in the same colour as my signature. 
John Grisham 

Part of my preparation is I go and ask the kit man what colour we're wearing - if it's red top, white shorts, white socks or black socks. Then I lie in bed the night before the game and visualise myself scoring goals or doing well. 
Wayne Rooney 

Pure drawing is an abstraction. Drawing and colour are not distinct, everything in nature is coloured. 
Paul Cezanne 

I love the sea's sounds and the way it reflects the sky. The colours that shimmer across its surface are unbelievable. This, combined with the colour of the water over white sand, surprises me every time. 
John Dyer 

Could people be trained to be less gullible? Or are you as stuck with gullibility as you are with skin colour? 
Keith Henson 

Fashion should be something that in the morning, when you open your window, you say, 'Oh fantastic, sun!' Then you take your shower, you say, 'OK fantastic, which colour I wear today because I feel happy?' This should be fashion. 
Roberto Cavalli 

I've dated some women who have turned me on to some funny things that are strange for men to actually do, but these things have become part of my process. I think the things I do for my appearance help make me look better. I even colour my hair because I like how it makes me look. 
Ryan Seacrest 

I am a great lover of art, in many forms: paintings, objets, textiles. I don't have the talent for painting, but I have a very good sense of colour, a love of visual beauty. 
Jacqueline Bisset 

There are no lines in nature, only areas of colour, one against another. 
Edouard Manet 

I've handled colour as a man should behave. You may conclude that I consider ethics and aesthetics as one. 
Josef Albers 

Red is a colour I've felt very strongly about. Maybe red is a very Indian colour, maybe it's one of those things that I grew up with and recognise at some other level. 
Anish Kapoor 

Red, of course, is the colour of the interior of our bodies. In a way it's inside out, red. 
Anish Kapoor 

I think the bottom of the totem pole is African-American women, or women of colour. I think they get the least opportunities in Hollywood. 
Denzel Washington


The wise become as the unwise in the enchanted chambers of Power, whose lamps make every face the same colour. 
Walter Savage Landor 

That's what the internet is: it's like bombarding your eyeballs with these myriad blinking colour lights. It's like trying to watch a movie on your phone in the middle of Times Square. 
Michel Gondry 

Jake Green isn't just Jake Green. Jake represents all of us. The colour green is the central column of the spectrum and the name Jake has all sorts of numerical values. All things come back to him within the film's world of cons and games. 
Guy Ritchie 

Who says soul has only one colour? 
Joss Stone 

I made my new album 'Colour Me Free!' in a week with my own money. 
Joss Stone 

We shouldn't build a technology to colour, or grey out, what people say. The media in general is balanced, although there are a lot of issues to be addressed that the media rightly pick up on. 
Tim Berners-Lee 

It's funny that all these goths paint their faces with such white make-up and that is the actual colour of my skin, I am that pale! 
Kelly Osbourne 

I became intrigued with colour theory. The absurd pronouncements of the Colour Institute, a group that decides what colours are hot each year or season, amused me. 
John Barton 

I use a wide selection of colours. It is impossible to produce work like mine using only the primary colours as they only mix a certain range of colour. 
John Dyer 

They tend to come out a colour called 'Pants left in wash' 
Eddie Izzard 

We should like to have some towering geniuses, to reveal us to ourselves in colour and fire, but of course they would have to fit into the pattern of our society and be able to take orders from sound administrative types. 
J. B. Priestley 

I do not believe that the colour of one's skin determines whether you are disadvantaged. 
Pauline Hanson 

The industry is quite chauvinistic generally. Expectations of women, girls, what they should look like, how they should be, what they should say, what they should wear, how their hair should be, what colour their skin should be. 
Gemma Arterton 

Blue is the male principle, stern and spiritual. Yellow the female principle, gentle, cheerful and sensual. Red is matter, brutal and heavy and always the colour which must be fought and vanquished by the other two. 
Franz Marc 

But, I would always be thinking of how pictures are constructed and colour, how to use it, I mean you're using it for constructing, makes you think about it, the place did as well. 
David Hockney 

I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way. 
Jean M. Auel 

When I was at Hartford in Connecticut, where I lived during the war, I published several pieces which were well received, not only by those of my own colour, but by a number of the white people, who thought they might do good among their servants. 
Jupiter Hammon 

I am of the African race, and in the colour which is natural to them of the deepest dye; and it is under a sense of the most profound gratitude to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. 
Benjamin Banneker 

The pigeon here is a beautiful bird, of a delicate bronze colour, tinged with pink about the neck, and the wings marked with green and purple. 
William John Wills 

So one day, in a fit of trying to do something different, I just dyed my hair dark brown and got my first role a week later, after which I thought: 'People are closed-minded, man! Like a different hair colour changes everything!' 
Emma Stone


A colour is a physical object as soon as we consider its dependence, for instance, upon its luminous source, upon other colours, upon temperatures, upon spaces, and so forth. 
Ernst Mach 

The idea is if you use those two shapes and try to colour the plane with them so the colours match, then the only way that you can do this is to produce a pattern which never repeats itself. 
Roger Penrose 

After Land I wanted to continue exploring the theme but I needed a new challenge so turned to colour. I explored Bradford and produced a series of urban landscapes that I liked, but because Land had made such an impact on the general public my colour work wasn't reviewed. 
Fay Godwin 

I had been working in colour for ten years or so and looked at digital and liked the possibilities it gave me. 
Fay Godwin 

I've never got on with the British press because they've always given me such a hard time. Once they build a band up they just want to do people down. They shouldn't concentrate on the colour of someone's shirt they should listen to the music. 
Andrew Eldritch 

Although I am basically self taught, I consider Debussy my teacher - the most important elements are colour, light and shadow. 
Toru Takemitsu 

Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere. 
Bram Stoker 

It's a dumb question, because I don't look at things as a black director, just as a director, so ask me as a director first and we can segue into the colour thing later. 
Antoine Fuqua 

Work at the same time on sky, water, branches, ground, keeping everything going on an equal basis... Don't be afraid of putting on colour... Paint generously and unhesitatingly, for it is best not to lose the first impression. 
Camille Pissarro 

This morning someone sent me a very funny photo of me holding their puppy. We have matching colour jackets. 
Luke Treadaway 

The colour of the skin is in no way connected with strength of the mind or intellectual powers. 
Benjamin Banneker 

I had been living with dialysis for three years or so, and the new kidney felt like a reprieve, a new gift of life. I felt alive again and I guess that has had an effect on my use of colour. 
Peter Wright 

I never know what it's going to look like. Wouldn't be much point in painting if I already knew the outcome. I have a subject in front of me and I start flooding colour and making marks, I don't know, it's improvisation isn't it? 
Peter Wright 

If you take myth and folklore, and these things that speak in symbols, they can be interpreted in so many ways that although the actual image is clear enough, the interpretation is infinitely blurred, a sort of enormous rainbow of every possible colour you could imagine. 
Diana Wynne Jones 

Nearly all the Brazilian supporters are wearing yellow shirts - it's a fabulous kaleidoscope of colour. 
John Motson 

When the shot is afterwards subjected to white light, colour appears because of selective reflection. 
Gabriel Lippmann 

The problem of direct colour photography has been facing us since the turn of the last century. 
Gabriel Lippmann 

The plate at each point only sends back to the eye the simple colour imprinted. The other colours are destroyed by interference. The eye thus perceives at each point the constituent colour of the image. 
Gabriel Lippmann 

In the case of composite colour, an infinity of systems must be obtained for maxima infinitely slight and with an infinity of interval values separating them - that is to say, the whole thickness of the sensitive layer is occupied in continuous manner by these maxima. 
Gabriel Lippmann 

Colour does not make so much difference. Look at the Bach Chaconne: There is not one dynamic mark in the whole Bach Chaconne. Colours do not make so much difference. 
Ruggiero Ricci


Sound is often talked about in a very subjective way, as if it had a colour. This is a bright sound, this is a dark sound. I don't believe in that because I think that is much too subjective. 
Daniel Barenboim 

The true colour of life is the colour of the body, the colour of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest colour of the unpublished blood. 
Alice Meynell 

My training was that you fill in the canvas where it needs colour and polishing. You start with the words on the first night and keep adding bits of business. 
Ron Moody 

I think it's because it was an emotional story, and emotions come through much stronger in black and white. Colour is distracting in a way, it pleases the eye but it doesn't necessarily reach the heart. 
Kim Hunter 

The stadium here in Munich is the best of the lot for me. It is absolutely fantastic, especially the way it lights up a different colour according to who is playing. It's superb. 
Claudia Schiffer 

When I see a colour or hear a sound, I am aware of something, and not of nothing. 
Charles D. Broad 

I know that if odour were visible, as colour is, I'd see the summer garden in rainbow clouds. 
Robert Bridges 

Circumstances give in reality to every political principle, its distinguishing colour, and discriminating effect. The circumstances are what render every civil and political scheme beneficial or noxious to mankind. 
David Trimble 

Such lovely warmth of thought and delicacy of colour are beyond all praise, and equally beyond all thanks! 
Marie Corelli 

Alfred Nobel stipulated that no distinction of race or colour will determine who received of his generosity. 
Abdus Salam 

Man needs colour to live; it's just as necessary an element as fire and water. 
Fernand Leger 

I am into drones and one chord freak outs and the paintings I am into are more minimal things the New York colour field painters and the soviet schools of the early/mid 20th century suprematism and constructionism. 
Will Sergeant 

There is something magical in seeing what you can do, what texture and tone and colour you can produce merely with a pen point and a bottle of ink. 
Ida Rentoul Outhwaite 

Speed kills colour... the gyroscope, when turning at full speed, shows up gray. 
Paul Morand 

It is claimed, but with what truth we cannot say, that there is a well-defined propaganda among the aliens of colour to bring about the degeneration of the white race. 
Emily Murphy 

With the brush we merely tint, while the imagination alone produces colour. 
Theodore Gericault 

And Life is Colour and Warmth and Light and a striving evermore for these; and he is dead, who will not fight; and who dies fighting has increase. 
Julian Grenfell 

Every form is a base for colour, every colour is the attribute of a form. 
Victor Vasarely