Quotes About Color

...chaos of color, like a shattered rainbow...

The sky it cries And the sun pats it dry With a rainbow up on high.

...after-storm birds singing the color into rainbows...

Riding on gardenias embracing rainbows...

God loves an idle rainbow, No less than labouring seas.

the vibrant green-yellow-pink blossom-life of spring the watery-blue radiant sunshine-breath of summer the metallic-earth-toned glowing-decay of autumn the grey-white holly-festive slow-motion of winter

Lush juices of ripe fruits, splashed color flung From Frost's first palette, purple, gold, and red; The last sweet song the meadow lark has sung,— Dirge of the summer dead.

We live in a shockingly beautiful world. We are walking through the living kingdom of heaven every day; the colours, the sound, the love of others, the potential to create, the plants, wildlife, nature, music, all sensations and life...but if we refuse to see colour and beauty we may as well be in Hell. Maybe an animated band was the best way of announcing this.

and elegant women who filled the air with perfume and colour like the flowers in front of the Tuileries Palace" (pg. 85)

Never before in history could so many white men consider themselves so free. Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.

The sky is gray and the big lake is duller and darker than the sky. In this dull light every color is accentuated, especially her skin. Her skin is white. The whiteness of her skin is like a thick, pale candle with a flame deep inside of it. In this light, the trees radiate greenness. Collected in: Sisters of the Earth: Women's Prose and Poetry About Nature by Lorraine Anderson

Bonnie Jean (who thinks all philosophers are idiots) has this quarrel with Wittgenstein, who in several places says that reddish green is inconceivable. Yet every summer, when our peppers are drying from green to red, one can see an intermediate stage that is precisely reddish green.

Why should color, of all things, be at the center of so much crossfire? Perhaps because in meddling with such a deep and seemingly instinctive area of perception, culture camouflages itself as nature more successfully there than in any other area of language. There is nothing remotely abstract, theoretical, philosophical, hypothetical, or any other -cal, so it seems, about the difference between yellow and red or between green and blue.

Franz Delitzsch, who put it most memorably when he wrote in 1878 that "we see in essence not with two eyes but with three: with the two eyes of the body and with the eye of the mind that is behind them. And it is in this eye of the mind in which the cultural-historical progressive development of the color sense takes place.

Mankind's perception of color, he says, increased "according to the schema of the color spectrum": first came the sensitivity to red, then to yellow, then to green, and only finally to blue and violet. The most remarkable thing about it all, he adds, is that this development seems to have occurred in exactly the same order in different cultures all over the world. Thus, in Geiger's hands, Gladstone's discoveries about

And he showed, using methods which would today be considered exemplary applications of systematic textual analysis but which one of his contemporary critics derided as the bean-counting mentality of "a born Chancellor of the Exchequer," that this vagueness in Homer's color descriptions was the rule, not the exception.

There are many languages that don't make a distinction between green and blue and treat these as shades of one color.

Japanese used to have a color word, ao, that spanned both green and blue.

Ammar's eyes opened without warning, vivid and blue, the same color as her own. He looked at her. She watched him settle into an awareness of the day, what morning it was.

You do not have to die this certain day. Death will abide, will pamper your postponement. I assure you death will wait. Death has a lot of time. Death can attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is just down the street; is most obliging neighbor; can meet you any moment. You need not die today. Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness. Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow. Graves grow no green that you can use. Remember, green's your color. You are Spring.

What color was his voice? A very beautiful voice. No one can give us the same feeling of beauty and kindness. […] He'd say that he could hear the sun rising.

Where Newton was reductionist, Goethe was holistic. Newton broke light apart and found the most basic physical explanation for color. Goethe walked through flower gardens and studied paintings, looking for a grand, all-encompassing explanation. Newton made his theory of color fit a mathematical scheme for all of physics. Goethe, fortunately or unfortunately, abhorred mathematics.

Feigenbaum persuaded himself that Goethe had been right about color. Goethe's ideas resemble a facile notion, popular among psychologists, that makes a distinction between hard physical reality and the variable subjective perception of it. The colors we perceive vary from time to time and from person to person—that much is easy to say.

It was the perception of color, to Goethe, that was universal and objective. What scientific evidence was there for a definable real-world quality of redness independent of our perception?