30 Quotes About Color All Maximalists Will Love

The Quote: "Color! What a deep and mysterious language, the language of dreams."

The Takeaway: Like music, color is a language. Artists use color to express motifs and moods instead of using words to articulate them.

The Quote: "He squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying/ light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are/ and I’m sure I once did too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know/ or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things/ like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man/ looks me in the yes and he points to the blue-orange vault/ over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss/ is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know"

The Takeaway: In his poem "And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When the Rapture Comes," Willis-Abdurraqib explores themes of connection, nostalgia and time passing, and the limits of human understanding through the allegory of a sunset and a man capturing its beauty camera, enhancing it his cellphone, and then sharing it on social media.

The Quote: "Color is a power which directly influences the soul."

The Takeaway: Color can affect people's emotions. Yellow breeds happiness. Blue has a calming effect. Red symbolizes love.

The Quote: "Remember, green's your color. You are spring."

The Takeaway: In this poem, "To the Young Who Want to Die," the speaker encourages the reader to embrace the rawness of life felt in youth, both the sorrow and the joy, the pain and the pleasure.

The Quote: "I am a believer that color affects people's moods."

The Takeaway: This quote reiterates the correlation between color and mood. Fashion designer Lilly Pulitzer's products often feature bright colors that emanate an energetic, uplifting mood.

The Quote: "If one could only catch that true color of nature—the very thought of it drives me mad."

The Takeaway: As much as we may try, it's impossible to capture nature's true color. It's like trying to capture the essence of the moon on an iPhone camera. You can only really experience it instead of capture or reproduce it.

The Quote: "I found I could say things with color and shapes that I couldn't say any other way."

The Takeaway: Georgia O'Keefe speaks to the magnitude of color's ability to evoke feeling and bring meaning to life's experience.

The Quote: "The best color in the whole world is the one that looks good on you."

The Takeaway: You can never go wrong with the color that brings out your best features and mood. Whether you fancy a red look or are all about a bright blue, all that matters is that it's the color that brings out your best self.

The Quote: "I gave to pink, the nerve of the red, a neon pink, an unreal pink."

The Takeaway: There's something about a neon color that hits different. Whether it appears in a neon sign or on clothes, bright neon colors offer a vibrancy that regular colors lack.

The Quote: "There's a reason we don't see the world in black and white."

The Takeaway: We're meant to see the world in color and appreciate all of the beauty it shows us. From sunsets to the colors of canyons to the blue of the ocean, it's all there to admire.

The Quote: "We live in a rainbow of chaos."

The Takeaway: This one basically gets at how the world is disorderly, but it's a colorful mess that's something to still appreciate.

The Quote: "Color helps to express light—not the physical phenomenon, but the only light that really exists, that in the artist's brain."

The Takeaway: Matisse refers to color as the mechanism through which abstract internal processes and emotions are realized. What artists think is often expressed through colors.

The Quote: "With color one obtains an energy that seems to stem from witchcraft."

The Takeaway: The colors we see and use are nothing less than magical. They bring an energy into a room, an outfit, or a building that is undeniable.

The Quote: "You think it's one color but it's not. Closer and closer the folds appear not a deeper blue grey but a heavier one and finally just inches above the trees it's a small bright seam full of smoke, not really bright but allowing the day as much as it needs."

The Takeaway: Like everything we experience, the colors we see do not reflect an objective reality, despite it feeling that way most of the time, which suggests the subjectivity of our perception. Our perception of colors change in certain lights, temperatures, etc., and when you think something is one color, or you only see one solid color, take a closer look and you'll discover all the multitudes it contains and how variable and mercurial it really is.

The Quote: "I'll try out the pencils sharpened to the point of infinity which always sees ahead: [Green]—good warm light. Magenta—Aztec. Old TLIAPALI blood of prickly pear, the brightest and oldest. [Brown]—color of mole, of leaves becoming earth. [Yellow]—madness sickness fear part of the sun and of happiness. [Blue]—electricity and purity love. [Black]—nothing is back. Really nothing. [Olive]—leaves, sadness, science, the whole of Germany is this color. [Yellow]—more madness and mystery all the ghosts wear clothes of this color, or at least their underclothes. [Dark blue]—color of bad advertisements and of good business. [Blue]—distance. Tenderness can also be this blue. [Red]—blood? Well, who knows!"

The Takeaway: In her notebook, Frida Kahlo explored her associations with a new set of colored pencils. She didn't actually give most of these their names, she just used the actual color as a reference.

The Quote: "He says what color are you making the sky and I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are."

The Takeaway: Poet Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib contemporizes our relationship to color, considering how it has shifted in the age of technology. Earlier in this poem, he explains how he increases the saturation, a word evocative of vibrant colors as well as an overload of information.

The Quote: "You can never judge a paint hue by the liquid color in the paint pot. You must apply it to the wall, wait for the paint to dry, then decide."

The Takeaway: This is essentially the color version of "Don't judge a book by its cover." You won't know what you're getting in a paint color until you see it in its final state, which is dried on the wall.

The Quote: "I sense a scream passing through nature. I painted... the clouds as actual blood. The color shrieked."

The Takeaway: Edvard Munch explains the inspiration behind his iconic painting, The Scream, in which he uses color to evoke a sound.

The Quote: "If we were to imagine an orange on the blue side or violet on the yellow side, it would give us the same impression as a north wind coming from southwest."

The Takeaway: Ludwig Wittgenstein was the philosopher to end all philosophy, theorizing that our entire worldview, and thus, our lived experiences, is contingent upon language, which is contingent upon worldview... Confused? It's basically just relativity applied to color theory.

The Quote: "During the blue nights you think the end of the day will never come... Blue nights are the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but they are also its warning."

The Takeaway: This is a rather optimistic excerpt from Joan Didion's memoir Blue Nights. Written one after her daughter, Quintana Roo, passed away a year after she lost her husband, it navigates grief, maternal love, and memory. The book opens with a deep dive into its namesake, a metaphor for the time of day and year that sits in the limbo that is loss.