Color Calendar 2009: Best Color Quotes of all time

In twelve months plus one cover image, everything I've learned about halation, invisible boundaries, luminosity, pure color, parents and children, and relationships between single swatches of color is presented along with my favorite quotes on color from everyone from The Beastie Boys and John Lennon, to Josef Albers, Goethe and Kermit the Frog.

Included are a few that are not in the calendar:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don't notice it.”
Alice Walker quotes (American writer, b.1944)

"In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is - as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art."
-Josef Albers

“The purest and most thoughtful minds are those which love color the most.”--
John Ruskin

"Mere color, unspoiled by meaning, and unallied with definite form, can speak to the soul in a thousand different ways."
Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)


"You think dark is just one color, but it ain't. There're five or six kinds of black. Some silky, some woolly. Some just empty. Some like fingers. And it don't stay still. It moves and changes from one kind of black to another. Saying something is pitch black is like saying something is green. What kind of green? Green like my bottles? Green like a grasshopper? Green like a cucumber, lettuce, or green like the sky is just before it breaks loose to storm? Well, night black is the same way. Might as well be a rainbow."
- Toni Morrison

" I think art parallels life; it is not a report on nature or on intimate disclosure of inner secrets. Color, in my opinion, behaves like man -- in two distinct ways: first in self-realization and then in the realization of relationships with others."
-Josef Albers

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

"I start from experience and read...always between polarities--loud and not-loud, young and old, spring and winter. If I can make black and white behave together instead of shooting at each other only, I feel proud. "
-Josef Albers


"The human being is played upon by various influences at various stages of his life in the body. We all know what climate and music will do to create different moods, but one factor often not understood or neglected is the influence of colour. It is always there in our surroundings, in a room, apartment, or house, in our clothing and in our furnishings. It can contribute towards health or take away from it; it can cheer up or depress the emotions; it can invigorate or devitalize the body; it can give pleasure to the eyes or irritate them."
- Paul Brunton

"Color is one of the great things in the world that makes life worth living to me and as I have come to think of painting it is my efforts to create an equivalent with paint color for the world -- life as I see it. "
-Georgia O'Keeffe

"Listen to the Color of your Dreams..."
-John Lennon

"The colors of a rainbow.....so pretty ..in the sky
Are also on the faces.....of people ..going by
I see friends shaking hands.....sayin.. how do you do
They're really sayin......i love you."
-Louis Armstrong

"It's not easy being green"
-Kermit THE frog

"In our life there is a single color, as on an artist’s palette, which provides the meaning of life and art. It is the color of love.
-Marc Chagall"

"My skin is kind of sort of brownish pinkish yellowish white. My eyes are greyish blueish green, but I'm told they look orange in the night. My hair is reddish blondish brown, but its silver when its wet, and all the colors I am inside have not been invented yet."
— Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends)

""My life is very monotonous," the fox said. "I hunt chickens: men hunt me. All the chickens are just alike, and all the men are just alike. And, in consequence, I am a little bored. But if you tame me, it will be as if the sun came to shine on my life. I shall know the sound of a step that will be different from all the others. Other steps send me hurrying back underneath the ground. Yours will call me, like music, out of my burrow. And then look: you see the grain fields down yonder? [...:] The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the color of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! The grain, which is also golden, will bring me back to the thought of you. And I shall love to listen to the wheat in the wind..." "
— Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince)

"Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"All colors made me happy: even gray."
— Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics))

"I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty."
— Pablo Neruda

"He tried to imagine the sound of the color red."
— Pete Hamill (Snow in August)

"The highest goal that man can achieve is amazement."
— Goethe, The Theory of Colors

if words can make
you feel color
the essence of blackness
the brilliance
of the sun
its dying at the end of the
day
with its mourners
the pinks and purples
its birthing
with its
bloods and blacks
Color!
Color is what we strive for
Color is what we should die for
Color
is what
both
the Painter
and the Poet
endeavor
to achieve.
-Jamey Austin


"Colors are the deeds/ and sufferings of light."
— Goethe

To see the images that go with the quotes, I've posted higher resolution images of each month on the facebook color page.

This is the culmination of over a year of study with Dick Nelson. Take advantage of my 30 day money back guarantee. If you don't love it, send it back for a full refund.