Ludwig Wittgenstein Quotes

He would not mind hearing Petrus's story one day. But preferably not reduced to English. More and more he is convinced that English is an unfit medium for the truth of South Africa. Stretches of English code whole sentences long have thickened, lost their articulations, their articulateness, their articulatedness. Like a dinosaur expiring and settling in the mud, the language has stiffened. Pressed into the mold of English, Petrus's story would come out arthritic, bygone"(117).

My only surprise when I saw Thanos up on the screen was how violet he was. I always saw his exposed hide as being more grayish violet.

We can only see as much and we can only go as far as our languages take us.

I'm a visual thinker. With almost all of my writing, I start with something that's visual: either the way someone says something that is visual or an actual visual description of a scene and color.

I dreamt that I could paint you with words, but there were no colors bright enough, black or white enough, blue or green enough...they didn't mean enough

The mountain trembled like an earthquake. Dust flew into the sky. And the rock turned dark red, like the color of blood'. 'How would you know?' Asks Sindhi cap. 'You only have a black and white television'. 'But it's a very good one. You can almost see colours.

Color must be thought, imagined, dreamed.

I mean there are so many different colors of life, of feeling, of articulation... so when I meet someone who's an 8-color type... I'm like, 'Hey girl, magenta!' and she's like, 'Oh, you mean purple!' and she goes off on her purple thing, and I'm like, 'No - I want magenta!'

...one sees differently with color photography than black-and-white... in short, visualization must be modified by the specific nature of the equipment and materials being used.

Light is a thing that cannot be reproduced, but must be represented by something else - by color.

A color which would be 'dirty' if it were the color of a wall, needn't be so in a painting.

If I see everything in gray, and in gray all the colors which I experience and which I would like to reproduce, then why should I use any other color?

The word itself has another color. It’s not a word with any resonance, although the e was once pronounced. There is only the bump now between b and l, the relief at the end, the whew. It hasn’t the sly turn which crimson takes halfway through, yellow’s deceptive jelly, or the rolled-down sound in brown. It hasn’t violet’s rapid sexual shudder or like a rough road the irregularity of ultramarine, the low puddle in mauve like a pancake covered in cream, the disapproving purse to pink, the assertive brevity of red, the whine of green.

What is the point of trying to put down on paper emotions that are too complex, too huge, too overwhelming to be confined by an alphabet? Love isn't the only word that fails. Hate does, too.

It seemed to me that it was possible to translate light, forms, and character using nothing but color, without recourse to values.

Words are nets through which all truth escapes.

I had no name for that particular hue of orange, other than unfortunate.

When I paint green, it doesn't mean grass; when I paint blue, it doesn't mean sky.

Paint your picture by means of the lights. Lights define texture and color - shadows define form.

And red is not the color of apples or roses or the dresses that pretty girls wear in the summertime. That is not the color of red at all.

It is hard indeed to notice anything for which the languages available to us have no description.

For me, language is about the impossibility of communicating what we precisely wish to communicate and this gorgeous attempt that we make to do that anyway. I love that we will never say exactly what we mean, but we will forever keep trying.

People observe the colors of a day only at its beginnings and 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-spot blues. Murky darkness. In my line of work, I make it a point to notice them.

I simply try to put down colors which render my sensation