81 Inspiring Quotes About Color

Colors have the profound ability to evoke emotions, inspire creativity, and transform our perceptions of the world around us. From the vibrant reds of a sunset to the calming blues of the ocean, every hue has its own unique story to tell. In our exploration of these vivid tales, we have gathered the top 81 inspiring quotes about color—words that capture the essence and beauty of the spectrum that surrounds us. Whether you're an artist seeking inspiration, a designer on the hunt for the perfect palette, or simply someone who appreciates the magic of color, these quotes offer a glimpse into how color influences our lives and imaginations. Join us as we delve into the wisdom and wonder of those who see the world through a colorful lens.

1. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.” - Alice Walker

2. “Drenched in British purples, I have offered up my tones: pigeon breast, hind belly, balky mule lung, monkey bottom pink, lapis lazuli and malachite, excited nymph thigh, panther pee-pee, high-smelling hen hair, hedgehog in aspic, barrel-maker's brothel, revered rose, monkeybush, turkey-like white, sly violet, page's slipper, immaculate nun spring, unspeakable red, Ensor azure, affected yellow, mummy skull, rock-hard gray, brunt celadon, shop soiled smoke ring.” - James Ensor

3. “On and on they flew, over the countryside parceled out in patches of green and brown, over roads and rivers winding through the landscapes like strips of matte and glossy ribbon.” - J.K. Rowling

4. “Autumn seemed to arrive suddenly that year. The morning of the first September was crisp and golden as an apple.” - J.K. Rowling

5. “I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” - Mark Rothko

6. “He just wanted to stand close to her, touch her hair that was white as glacier milk...” - Janet Fitch

7. “She would be half a planet away, floating in a turquoise sea, dancing by moonlight to flamenco guitar.” - Janet Fitch

8. “I closed my eyes to watch tiny dancers like jeweled birds cross the dark screen of my eyelids.” - Janet Fitch

9. “Her fingers moved among barnacles and mussels, blue-black, sharp-edged. Neon red starfish were limp Dalis on the rocks, surrounded by bouquets of stinging anemones and purple bursts of spiny sea urchins.” - Janet Fitch

10. “She turned back to inspect a bank of greens: olive, jade, leaf, kiwi, lime, a silver-green like the back of birch leaves, a bright pistachio.” - Anne Bartlett

11. “I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample under foot. Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color. They are superior who have the best heart — the best brain.” - Robert Ingersoll

12. “After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with color, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn’t it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked—as I am surprisingly often—why I bother to get up in the mornings.” - Richard Dawkins

13. “Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” - Rabindranath Tagore

14. “To my surprise, I had not just doodled, I had prayed (I drew new shapes and names of each friend and focused on the person whose name stared at me from the paper). I had though OF each person as I drew but not ABOUT each person. I could just sit with them in a variation on stillness. I could hold them in prayer.” - Sybil MacBeth

15. “It's good to let God pick a man for you. We don't do so well when we pick them ourselves. They end up lipsticks in a drawer, all those wrong colors you thought looked so good in the package.” - Deb Caletti

16. “You know the days when you get the mean reds?Paul Varjak: The mean reds. You mean like the blues?Holly Golightly: No. The blues are because you’re getting fat, and maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re just sad, that’s all. The mean reds are horrible. Suddenly you’re afraid, and you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Do you ever get that feeling?” - Truman Capote

17. “Whatever you choose for your stationery is your favorite color because it's where you pour your heart out.” - Mary E. Pearson

18. “…“white supremacy” is a much more useful term for understanding the complicity of people of color in upholding and maintaining racial hierarchies that do not involve force (i.e slavery, apartheid) than the term “internalized racism”- a term most often used to suggest that black people have absorbed negative feelings and attitudes about blackness. The term “white supremacy” enables us to recognize not only that black people are socialized to embody the values and attitudes of white supremacy, but we can exercise “white supremacist control” over other black people.” - bell hooks

19. “... los colores no pueden comprenderse, se sienten.” - Orhan Pamuk

20. “El significado de los colores es que están ante nosotros y podemos verlos - le contestó el otro -. No se puede explicar el rojo a quien no lo ha visto.” - Orhan Pamuk

21. “***A SMALL THEORY***People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and its ends, but to me it's quite clear that a day merges through a multitude of shades and intonations, with each passing moment. A single hour can consist of thousands of different colors. Waxy yellows, cloud-spat blues. Murky darknesses. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them. ” - Markus Zusak

22. “Each day has a color, a smell.” - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

23. “I wanted this day, the perfect buttery sun like peach ice cream, the speed, the satin leather of the car seat, the fair. Forbidden fruit, a day like no other. ” - Beth Gutcheon

24. “Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways. ” - Oscar Wilde

25. “Why do two colors, put one next to the other, sing? Can one really explain this? no. Just as one can never learn how to paint.” - Pablo Picasso

26. “White is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. God paints in many colors; but He never paints so gorgeously, I had almost said so gaudily, as when He paints in white. ” - G.K. Chesterton

27. “He had that curious love of green, which in individuals is always the sign of a subtle artistic temperament, and in nations is said to denote a laxity, if not a decadence of morals. ” - Oscar Wilde

28. “The world is exploding in emerald, sage, and lusty chartreuse - neon green with so much yellow in it. It is an explosive green that, if one could watch it moment by moment throughout the day, would grow in every dimension.” - Amy Seidl

29. “Love was a feeling completely bound up with color, like thousands of rainbows superimposed one on top of the other.” - Paulo Coelho

30. “Sometimes it's important to work for that pot of gold. But other times it's essential to take time off and to make sure that your most important decision in the day simply consists of choosing which color to slide down on the rainbow.” - Douglas Pagels

31. “They sang the words in unison, yet somehow created a web of sounds with their voices. It was like hearing a piece of fabric woven with all the colors of a rainbow. I did not know that such beauty could be formed by the human mouth. I had never heard harmony before.” - Anita Diamant

32. “He was golden and beautiful as a sunset.” - Anita Diamant

33. “...early on Monday evening, when the sky was the color of a velvet ribbon falling over the hills.” - Alice Hoffman

34. “The sky is already purple; the first few stars have appeared, suddenly, as if someone had thrown a handful of silver across the edge of the world.” - Alice Hoffman

35. “When the cold comes to New England it arrives in sheets of sleet and ice. In December, the wind wraps itself around bare trees and twists in between husbands and wives asleep in their beds. It shakes the shingles from the roofs and sifts through cracks in the plaster. The only green things left are the holly bushes and the old boxwood hedges in the village, and these are often painted white with snow. Chipmunks and weasels come to nest in basements and barns; owls find their way into attics. At night,the dark is blue and bluer still, as sapphire of night.” - Alice Hoffman

36. “Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgandy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.” - Jack Kerouac

37. “Sunrise paints the sky with pinks and the sunset with peaches. Cool to warm. So is the progression from childhood to old age.” - Vera Nazarian

38. “The phrase and the day and the scene harmonized in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic prose?” - James Joyce

39. “I'm painting color squares. Onesquare - one color. That's what I paint.” - Nigel Tomm

40. “A small brazier glowed near the monk's left hand. On a lecturn before him lay pots of paints, brushes, a quill, a pen, a knife, a sizeable handbell, the tooth of some animal--and a piece of parchment. It was the parchment that commanded the room. Until he saw it Len didn't realize how starved he had been of colour. Villagers dressed in various shades of brown and beige, like their furniture and fields and now, here, was an irruption of the rainbow, as if a charm of goldfinches had landed on the manuscript and been transfixed.” - Diana Norman

41. “Her heavy peasant face was fringed by a bang of red hair like a woolen table-spread, a color at once strange and attractive, an obstinate color, a color that seemed to make Lena feel something alien and bad-tempered had settled over her forehead...” - Djuna Barnes

42. “If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.” - G.K. Chesterton

43. “And like flowers in the fields, that make wonderful views, when we stand side-by-side in our wonderful hues..We all make a beauty so wonderfully true.We are special and different, and just the same, too!So whenever you look at your beautiful skin, from your wiggling toes to your giggling grin...Think how lucky you are that the skin you live in, so beautifully holds the "You" who's within.” - Michael Tyler

44. “It is when we think we can act like God, that all respect is lost, and I think this is the downfall of peace. We lie if we say we do not see color and culture and difference. We fool ourselves and cheat ourselves when we say that all of us are the same. We should not want to be the same as others and we should not want others to be the same as us. Rather, we ought to glory and shine in all of our differences, flaunting them fabulously for all to see! It is never a conformity that we need! We need not to conform! What we need is to burst out into all these beautiful colors!” - C. JoyBell C.

45. “God is colourblind. But we are not God. God does not need to see colour and difference. God is far bigger than all of that. We are human. We are destined to grow and learn from each other and with each other and there is no growing, there is no learning, there is no wonder and no majesty in life if we were like God. We were meant to see colour and difference.To deny these is to lack respect. To blind ourselves to these is to fool one another. To shun these is to deny ourselves growth and knowledge.” - C. JoyBell C.

46. “We are all equal in the fact that we are all different. We are all the same in the fact that we will never be the same. We are united by the reality that all colours and all cultures are distinct & individual. We are harmonious in the reality that we are all held to this earth by the same gravity. We don't share blood, but we share the air that keeps us alive. I will not blind myself and say that my black brother is not different from me. I will not blind myself and say that my brown sister is not different from me. But my black brother is he as much as I am me. But my brown sister is she as much as I am me.” - C. JoyBell C.

47. “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” - Ted Grant

48. “[Orange] is one of God's favorite colors--- He stuck it right there between red and yellow as the second color in the rainbow. He decorates entire forests with shades of orange every autumn. It shows up in sunrises at the start of the day, sunsets at the end of the day, and in the glow of the moon at the right time of night.” - Reggie Joiner

49. “Your paintings are staggeringly beautiful. Did I ever tell you that,or was I just too concerned that you weren't going to earn a living? I know the answer...I worried that the paint was so thickly applied that it might snap off and ruin someone's carpet, rather than realizing that you'd made color itself tactile.” - Rosamund Lupton

50. “Years later, on a Steve Jobs discussion board on the website Gawker, the following tale appeared from someone who had worked at the Whole Foods store in Palo Alto a few blocks from Jobs' home: 'I was shagging carts one afternoon when I saw this silver Mercedes parked in a handicapped spot. Steve Jobs was inside screaming at his car phone. This was right before the first iMac was unveiled and I'm pretty sure I could make out, 'Not. Fucking. Blue. Enough!!!” - Walter Isaacson

51. “The beauty and mystery of this world only emerges through affection, attention, interest and compassion . . . open your eyes wide and actually see this world by attending to its colors, details and irony.” - Orhan Pamuk

52. “it'll be this kind of deep blue”she said. “The kind of color that somehow sucks your eyes and your ears and all your words —the color of a completely closed-in night” - Banana Yoshimoto

53. “She knew then that white was more than a color: It was a cold, pale shade of understanding that seems to take all of your hope away.” - Vannetta Chapman

54. “Fall colors are funny. They’re so bright and intense and beautiful. It’s like nature is trying to fill you up with color, to saturate you so you can stockpile it before winter turns everything muted and dreary.” - Siobhan Vivian

55. “From the floor, I see the tops of the Philadelphia skyline out of her window. Staring at it, I realize that the night sky isn't really black, which is the way I've always thought of it. It's actually a dark shade of blue, the darkest possible.” - Siobhan Vivian

56. “So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay.-- Robert Frost” - John Green

57. “There are some parts of the world that, once visited, get into your heart and won't go. For me, India is such a place. When I first visited, I was stunned by the richness of the land, by its lush beauty and exotic architecture, by its ability to overload the senses with the pure, concentrated intensity of its colors, smells, tastes, and sounds. It was as if all my life I had been seeing the world in black and white and, when brought face-to-face with India, experienced everything re-rendered in brilliant technicolor.” - Keith Bellows

58. “Don’t you dare come into my world and tell me what color the ocean is! It’s black. Black as midnight. Black and awful!” - Nadia Scrieva

59. “Isn't it strange that I know you'd risk your life to save mine, but I don't even know what your favorite color is?” - Suzanne Collins

60. “I've been 40 years discovering that the queen of all colors was black.” - Pierre Auguste Renoir

61. “When you want to make the main color pure and bright, don't just keep adding bright colors on it. Just make the colors around the spot darker and dull. It will give the scene dramatical effects.I think the life is the same.” - Hiroko Sakai

62. “In every motions to put colors on my canvas, I feel like I am screaming, "I AM HERE"... To whom?.. To where?... Where am I going to...?” - Hiroko Sakai

63. “...I'm innocent still -inside me are stained glass windows that have never been broken- and when I see your light it stains my soul with color ...” - John Geddes

64. “‎"But when I fell in love with black, it contained all color. It wasn’t a negation of color. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colors. Black is the most aristocratic color of all.... You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing." Happy birthday to Louise Nevelson (1899-1988)!” - Louise Nevelson. Sky Cathedral. 1958.

65. “Any other questions?""Just one," I say. "What color are your eyes?" I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself - the real Ky - when he dares to look."Blue," he says sounding surprised, "they've always been blue.""Not to me.""What do they look like to you?" he says puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes."Lots of colors," I say. "At first I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green...""What are they now?" he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and deep as I want."Well?""Everything," I tell him, "They're everything.” - Ally Condie

66. “We don't take orders from you, Sergeant." Quain said. "Your man tried to assassinate-""He isn't mine. My man has eyes that change color with the seasons.” - Maria V. Snyder

67. “I hear the question upon your lips: What is it to be a colour?Colour is the touch of the eye, music to the deaf, a word out of the darkness. Because I’ve listened to souls whispering – like the susurrus of the wind – from book to book and object to object for tens or thousands of years, allow me to say that my touch resembles the touch of angels. Part of me, the serious half, calls out to your vision while the mirthful half sours through the air with your glances.I’m so fortunate to be red! I’m fiery. I’m strong. I know men take notice of me and that I cannot be resisted.I do not conceal myself: For me, delicacy manifests itself neither in weakness nor in subtlety, but through determination and will. So, I draw attention to myself. I’m not afraid of other colours, shadows, crowds or even of loneliness. How wonderful it is to cover a surface that awaits me with my own victorious being! Wherever I’m spread, I see eyes shine, passions increase, eyebrows rise and heartbeats quicken. Behold how wonderful it is to live! Behold how wonderful to see. I am everywhere. Life begins with and returns to me. Have faith in what I tell you.” - Orhan Pamuk

68. “... And the boy whose hair remained the color of lemons forever.” - Markus Zusak

69. “The angel said, "I like black-and-white films more than color because they're more artificial. You have to work harder to overcome your disbelief. It's sort of like prayer.” - Jonathan Carroll

70. “A sob caught in my chest. I didn't even know what a gray was, other than a drab color. All I knew was that I was hungry all the time. And I knew, deep down, that it wasn't just for food.” - Michelle Rowen

71. “Colors. Would it be green or blue today? Maybe white—my favorite. A dark voice in the back of my mind offered no color at all as an alternative. I smothered that voice. The days of no color were simply too hard to bear. I needed color today.” - Julie Hockley

72. “Color is the overpowering of black; white – the final victory over black.” - Dejan Stojanovic

73. “Oh Paris From red to green all the yellow dies away Paris Vancouver Hyeres Maintenon New York and the AntillesThe window opens like an orange The beautiful fruit of light("Windows")” - Guillaume Apollinaire

74. “Contrasts The windows of my poetry are wide open on the boulevards and in the shop windows ShineThe precious stones of light Listen to the violins of the limousines and the xylophones of the linotypesThe sketcher washes with the hand-towel of the skyAll is color spotsAnd the hats of the women passing by are comets in the conflagration of the eveningUnity There's no more unityAll the clocks now read midnight after being set back ten minutesThere's no more time.There's no more money.In the ChamberThey are spoiling the marvelous elements of raw material("Contrasts")” - Blaise Cendrars

75. “So I'm gonna write it down to scream it out, and I'm never gonna be the same again. Fear is the color you've all exposed, now I gotta get up here and prove the importance of my clothes of my pose. I suppose, again.” - Tegan Quin

76. “Beneath the armor of skin/and/bone/and/mindmost of our colors are amazingly the same.” - Aberjhani

77. “The cyclone had set the house down gently, very gently – for a cyclone—in the midst of a country of marvelous beauty. There were lovely patches of green sward all about, with stately trees bearing rich and luscious fruits. Banks of gorgeous flowers were on every hand, and birds with rare and brilliant plumage sang and fluttered in the trees and bushes. A little way off was a small brook, rushing and sparkling along between green banks, and murmuring in a voice very grateful to a little girl who had lived so long on the dry, gray prairies.” - L. Frank Baum

78. “The color palette is confined to that of a Gustave Dore' engraving, greys and blacks, and subtle shadings of these rendered in harrowing crosshatches and highlighted with sudden glaring areas of nothingness, like splotches of vitiligo sent to haunt the dead with memories of what real light did to the eyes.” - Kevin Hearne

79. “We made love like green is blue. That’s because we were only half into it, though for the record I was the blue and she was the disinterested yellow.
” - Dark Jar Tin Zoo

80. “Gratitude is the real treasure God wants us to find, because it isn't the pot of gold but the rainbow that colors our world.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

81. “From around the corner's edge a grotesque light was trickling out, the first intimations of an ominous sunrise over a dark horizon. I dimly recognized this colored light, though not from my waking memory. It grew more intense, now pouring out in weird streams from beyond the solid margin of the building. And the more intense it grew, the more clearly I could hear the screaming voice that had called out to me in a dream. I shouted his name, but the swelling colored brightness was a field of fear which kept me from making any move toward it. It was no amalgam of colors comparable to anything in mortal experience. It was as if all natural colors had been mutated into a painfully lush iridescence by some prism fantastically corrupted in its form; it was a rainbow staining the sky after a poison deluge; it was an aurora painting the darkness with a blaze of insanity, a blaze that did not burn vigorously but shimmered with an insect-jeweled frailness. And, in actuality, it was nothing like these color-filled effusions, which are merely a feeble means of partially fixing a reality uncommunicable to those not initiated to it, a necessary resorting to the makeshift gibberish of the mystic isolated by his experience and left without a language to describe it.("The Dreaming In Nortown")” - Thomas Ligotti