True Colour Quotes & Sayings

The greatest of characters, no doubt, would be he, who, free of all trifling accidental helps, could see objects through one grand immutable medium, always at hand, and proof against illusion and time, reflecting every object in its true shape and colour through all the fluctuation of things. — Johann Kaspar Lavater

Naturalness?' I said, loudly. 'This lot'll tell you anything is natural; they'll tell you greed and hate and jealousy and paranoia and unthinking religious awe and fear of God and hating anybody who's another colour or thinks different is natural. Hating blacks or hating whites or hating women or hating men or hating gays; that's natural. Dog-eat-dog, looking out for number one, no lame ducks . . . Shit, they're so convinced about what's natural it's the more sophisticated ones that'll tell you suffering and evil are natural and necessary because otherwise you can't have pleasure and goodness. They'll tell you any one of their rotten stupid systems is the natural and right one, the one true way; what's natural to them is whatever they can use to fight their own grimy corner and fuck everybody else. They're no more natural than us than an amoeba is more natural than them just because it's cruder. — Iain M. Banks

What you knew in your childhood is true; the Otherworld of magic and enchantment is real, sometimes terribly real - and certainly more real than the factual reality which our culture has built up, brick by brick, to shut out colour and light and prevent us from flying. — Patrick Harpur

Yesterday, when we were packing, Julius asked me,
"If you could rub Tulip out of your past life, would you do it?"
And I had to shake my head. I can't regret the times we had together. Sometimes I worry I won't have times like that again, that there will be no lit nights, no incandescent days. But I know it's not true. There can be colour in a million ways. I know I'll find it on my own. — Anne Fine

He [the artist] ought to have 'these powerful organs of expression' - colour and chiaroscuro - entirely at his command, that he may use them in every possible form, as well as that he may do with the most perfect freedom; therefore, whether he wishes to make the subject of a joyous, solemn, or meditative character, by flinging over it the cheerful aspect which the sun bestows, by a proper disposition of shade, or by the appearances that beautify its arising or its setting, a true "General Effect" should never be lost sight of. — John Constable

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. — Carl Sagan

Was there some subtle affinity between the chemical atoms that shaped themselves into form and colour on the canvas and the soul that was within him? Could it be that what that soul thought, they realized? -- that what it dreamed, they made true? — Oscar Wilde

Looking through the ruby glass one cannot see the true colour of the sky. — Lara Biyuts

When Sony was introducing the boom box, the company gathered a group of potential customers and held a focus group on what colour the new product should be: black or yellow. After some discussion among the group of likely buyers, everyone agreed that consumers would better respond to yellow. After the session, the facilitator thanked the group, and then mentioned that, as a bonus, they were welcome to take a free boom box on the way out. There were two piles of boom boxes: yellow and black. Every person took a black boom box.'5 Clearly what people say isn't always a true reflection of what they think, so we need a way of getting into these shadowy issues and seeing how they affect the customer's goals. — Matt Watkinson

I felt an angry flush colour my face. "I was in the middle of training. I don't need your help."
"I'm the best swordsman in the Royal Guard," he said without arrogance, and I knew it was true. "Don't you want to learn from the best?"
"I was learning from second best, which is quite alright with me." I thrust my chin up in the air haughtily, running my eyes down the length of his body with a look of distaste. "Why don't you return to your mistress, Captain? I've heard she enjoys a bit of swordplay."
Wolfe laughed. — Samantha Young

True beauty is a ray
That springs from the sacred depths of the soul,
and illuminates the body, just as life
springs from the kernel of a stone and
gives colour and scent to a flower. — Kahlil Gibran

How many times have your true colours faded just because the world was colour blind. — Jenim Dibie

The importance of colour is as nothing compared with that of form, chiaroscuro and arrangement. They are the true and enduring bases of pictorial art. — Walter J. Phillips

Nothing is so sad, in my opinion, as the devastation wrought by age.
My poor friend. I have described him many times. Now to convey to you the difference. Crippled with arthritis, he propelled himself about in a wheelchair. His once plump frame had fallen in. He was a thin little man now. His face was lined and wrinkled. His moustache and hair, and hair, it is true, were still of a jet black colour, but candidly, though I would not for the world have hurt his feelings by saying so to him, this was a mistake. There comes a moment when hair dye is only too painfully obvious. There had been a time when I had been surprised to learn that the blackness of Poirot's hair came out of a bottle. But now the theatricality was apparent and merely created the impression that he wore a wig and had adorned his upper lip to amuse children! — Agatha Christie

Under the colour of commending him I have access my own love to prefer; But Silvia is too fair, too true, too holy, To be corrupted with my worthless gifts. — William Shakespeare

No religion is absolutely perfect. Yet not only do we fight for religion, but also are we often willing to sacrifice our lives for it. And what we hopelessly fail to do is to live it. A true religion is that which has no caste, no creed, no colour. It is but an all-uniting and all-pervading embrace. — Sri Chinmoy

Only now, years after having read though the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, Scott, Poe, Balzac did he realise that even the most prolific writer created only one novel; throw away the individual bindings and the whole of each man's writing constituted one book: the true and complete portrait of himself. An artist had one thing to say, and one only; he might flail about, seek new techniques, forms, colour combinations, subjects, but intrinsically he would always paint the same canvas, write the same book. — Irving Stone

I feel sick when I look at the parody synopsis, at the letters from the film company ... The novel is 'about' a colour problem. I said nothing in it that wasn't true. But the emotion it came out of was something frightening, the unhealthy, feverish illicit excitement of wartime, a lying nostalgia, a longing for licence, for freedom, for the jungle, for formlessness. It is so clear to me that I can't read that novel now without feeling ashamed, as if I were in a street naked. Yet no one else seems to see it. Not one of the reviewers saw it. Not one of my cultivated and literary friends saw it. It is an immoral novel because that terrible lying nostalgia lights every sentence. — Doris Lessing

Piper knew that wasn't exactly true. Looking at him, her heart did a little tap dance. Jason was dressed simply in jeans and a clean purple T-shirt, like he'd worn at the Grand Canyon. He had new trainers on, and his hair was newly trimmed. His eyes were the same colour as the sky. Aphrodite's message was clear: This one needs no improvement. — Rick Riordan

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower; when they are faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly. — John Ruskin

But sometimes I do wonder if I'm love-blind the way some people are colour-blind, or most people are ghost-blind. If love (true or false, thick or thin, requited or un-) really is the only glue ever mortars our sad hearts' bricks together, and me not swift enough to recognize the label any time I happened to pass it by.
Because: living is transience, after all--people aren't really permanent 'til they're dead, no matter what you might've felt for 'em beforehand. Always changing... — Gemma Files

The love we hold sees no boundaries, it feels no limits, it crosses all frontiers. It can enrich us or send us spiralling to the deepest fathoms and if it is true, it can cross oceans and climb mountains, blind to race, creed and colour...It is a beautiful thing, this thing that claims our hearts. — Virginia Alison

When I went to bed, I stared earnestly at my face in the glass. Was I really good-looking? Honestly I couldn't say I thought so! I hadn't got a straight Grecian nose, or a rosebud mouth, or any of the things you ought to have. It is true that a curate once told me that my eyes were like "imprisoned sunshine in a dark, dark wood" - but curates always know so many quotations, and fire them off at random. I'd much prefer to have Irish blue eyes than dark green ones with yellow flecks! Still, green is a good colour for adventuresses. — Agatha Christie

For true art there is no such thing as preparatory schooling, but there are certainly preparations; the best, however, is when the least pupil takes a share in master's work. Colour-grinders have turned into very good artists. — Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

I think the kind of landscape that you grew up in, it lives with you. I don't think it's true of people who've grown up in cities so much; you may love a building, but I don't think that you can love it in the way that you love a tree or a river or the colour of the earth; it's a different kind of love. — Arundhati Roy

He domesticated and developed the native wild flowers. He had one hill-side solidly clad with that low-growing purple verbena which mats over the hills of New Mexico. It was like a great violet velvet mantle thrown down in the sun; all the shades that the dyers and weavers of Italy and France strove for through centuries, the violet that is full of rose colour and is yet not lavender; the blue that becomes almost pink and then retreats again into sea-dark purple - the true Episcopal colour and countless variations of it. — Willa Cather

I am an absurd idealist. But I believe that all that must come true. For, unless it comes true, the world will be laid desolate. And I believe that it can come true. I believe that, by the grace of God, men will awake presently and be men again, and colour and laughter and splendid living will return to a grey civilisation. But that will only come true because a few men will believe in it, and fight for it, and fight in its name against everything that sneers and snarls at that ideal. — Leslie Charteris

In a sense, one could speak of the secret life of colour. Despite its outward beckoning, like true beauty, colour is immensely hesitant in giving away its secrets. Painters learn to respect the hesitancy of colour and endeavour to refine their skill to become worthy of its revelations. A painter learns the language of colour slowly. As with any language, you struggle for a long time outside the language. There is a willed deliberateness to how you sequence the strange words to make a sentence.Then one day the language lets you in to where the words dance to your thoughts with ease and fluency. Perhaps for the painter there is a day when colour lets him in, when his palette sings with synergy and delight. — John O'Donohue

Sometimes friends do foolish things. My father told me that true friends are like gold coins. Ships are wrecked by storms and lie for hundreds of years on the ocean floor. Worms destroy the wood. Iron corrodes. Silver turns black but gold doesn't change in sea water. It loses none of its brilliance or colour. It comes up the same. It survives shipwrecks and time. — Michael Robotham

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

The intellectual attainments of a man who thinks for himself resemble a fine painting, where the light and shade are correct, the tone sustained, the colour perfectly harmonised; it is true to life. On the other hand, the intellectual attainments of the mere man of learning are like a large palette, full of all sorts of colours, which at most are systematically arranged, but devoid of harmony, connection and meaning. — Arthur Schopenhauer

When the immense drugged universe explodes
In a cascade of unendurable colour
And leaves us gasping naked,
This is no more than the ectasy of chaos:
Hold fast, with both hands, to that royal love
Which alone, as we know certainly, restores
Fragmentation into true being.
Ecstasy of Chaos — Robert Graves

It almost always happens that true, but exaggerated, coloring is more agreeable than absolute coloring. — Michel Eugene Chevreul

The days before, even the score of what you are filled in with today. What colour are you, the tangled hues of years gone by that affected you? — Juliet Castle

A game at which the liberals have become masters is that of deliberate evasiveness. The question often comes up 'what can you do?'. If you ask him to do something like stopping to use segregated facilities or dropping out of varsity to work at menial jobs like all blacks or defying and denouncing all provisions that make him privileged, you always get the answer - 'but that's unrealistic!' While this may be true, it only serves to illustrate the fact that mo matter what a white man does, the colour of his skin - his passport to privilege- will always put him miles ahead of the black men. Thus in the ultimate analysis, no white person can escape being part of the oppressor camp. — Steve Biko

GEJ is the only president in recent years who did not allocate a single oil bloc to anybody, not to talk of himself.
And these are the areas where you can tell corruption in its true colour.
He did not allocate oil bloc to himself, family or friends up till now.
He also did not give a single marginal field to himself or anybody else even though he is the only president that comes from the Niger Delta where the oil is coming from. — Nuhu Ribadu

Red, brown, yellow, green, black. Five colours to say everything that could be said. And what Cy suddenly wanted, more than anything in the world just then, what he wanted was that missing blue, primary and resistant to the trade. Blue that was unstable and misbehaved when left in skin. Blue like the sea that had taken his father. Blue, for his mother's sake, and for the true colour of every bereaved and bloodless heart when it is collapsing. — Sarah Hall

Generals trump Majors," Ursan said.
"True, but do princes trump generals?"
"I attacked him."
"Ryne's not the type to hold a grudge."
Ursan considered. "Isn't he a king? Both his parents died"
"Technically, yes. But he hasn't assumed the title."
"Neither has Prince Kerrick," Ursan said. " Don't you find that odd?"
"Not with Kerrick. He loved his father very much. I think it's still too painful for him to assume the title. Plus he hasn't been home in years."
Ursan remained quiet until we reached his tent. "Prince Kerrick's a forest mage. Which means his eyes change colour with the seasons. Right?"
"Yes."
He stared at me for a moment. "Lucky guy." Ursan ducked into his tent. — Maria V. Snyder

You don't usually think of boredom as something similar to pain. That's because you've only been exposed to it in relatively small doses. You don't know its true colour. The difference between the boredom you know and the boredom I know is like the difference between touching snow and putting your hand in a vat of liquid nitrogen. — Alastair Reynolds