Black Gray And White Quotes

“We're prone to totally deny something that is abused, because it's easier than handling it.
I've noticed that truth is very rarely found in the extremes, in the black and white - you'll usually find it right in the middle, in the gray. It's just much harder to find that way.
We're lazy; however, and we'll take the ten step program or the list of rules before we do the dirty, difficult work of prayer, meditation and study that comes with living in the tension. It's always easier to default to an extreme than it is to find the buried, messy truth that is found in living in the already and the not yet - in the tension.”

— Cole Ryan

“I am tired of people saying that poor character is the only reason people do wrong things. Actually, circumstances cause people to act a certain way. It's from those circumstances that a person's attitude is affected followed by weakening of character. Not the reverse. If we had no faults of our own, we should not take so much pleasure in noticing those in others and judging their lives as either black or white, good or bad. We all live our lives in shades of gray.”

— Shannon L. Alder

“The conflicting missions of the two armies seemed to have no fog, no gray, only black-and-white clarity. I had lived my life in terms of compromise, rule-bending, trade-offs, concessions, bargaining, striking deals, finding middle ground. In these two great armies, there was no such thing. Good was good, and evil was evil, and they shared no common ground.”

— Randy Alcorn

“Gray is not a substitute for black and white. You don't bump into people without saying you're sorry. When you shake hands, it's supposed to mean something. If someone is in trouble, you reach out.”

— Jon M. Huntsman Sr.

“The city belongs to the black man. The white man was a convenient target until there were no white men left in Detroit. What used to be black and white is now gray. Whites got the suburbs and everything else. The black machine's got the city and the black machine's at war with itself. The spoils go to the one who understands that.”

— Charlie LeDuff

“Between the radiant white of a clear conscience and the coal black of a conscience sullied by sin lie many shades of gray
where most of us live our lives. Not perfect but not beyond redemption.”

— Sherry L. Hoppe

“A person's character, I realize, is never black-and-white. There is so much gray.”

— Jessica Warman

“Do you see things in black and white, or are there shades of gray for you?"
"I hope there's gray ... Black and white make things easier, but only if you don't want to think.”

— Harry Turtledove

“People don't understand us. They don't understand me. They think it's so black and white, that he makes me miserable and that I should be with someone else and that I deserve something else.
But it's not black and white at all. It's gray. It's a never ending world of gray.”

— Amanda Grace

“Rooks have clustered on either side of the long road. It is as if they line a grand parade route for our passage. Their black feathers are stark as soot against the white road and the snow. They stab at the ground with their strange bare bills and gray unfeathered faces. The birds are like rough-edged black stones on a string around this stripped cold neck of road. The old books tell us rooks bring the virtuous dead to heaven's gate.”

— Ned Hayes

“The world isn't black and white, good or bad. The battles that make a real difference are fought in the murky area in between, where the greater good requires brutal sacrifice. Where both the means and the ends are just shadows in a featureless gray landscape. And that was the death of my idealism.”

— Rachel Vincent

“White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens.
A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ("The North")”

— Yevgeny Zamyatin

“Winter came and the city [Chicago] turned monochrome
black trees against gray sky above white earth. Night now fell in midafternoon, especially when the snowstorms rolled in, boundless prairie storms that set the sky close to the ground, the city lights reflected against the clouds”

— Barack Obama

“An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep.”

— Barry López

“And that's what your holy men discuss, is it?" "Not usually. There is a very interesting debate raging at the moment about the nature of sin, for example." "And what do they think? Against it, are they?" "It's not as simple as that. It's not a black and white issue. There are so many shades of gray." "Nope." "Pardon?" "There's no grays, only white that's got grubby. I'm surprised you don't know that. And sin, young man, is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That's what sin is." "It's a lot more complicated than that-" "No. It ain't. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they're getting worried that they won't like the truth. People as things, that's where it starts.”

— Terry Pratchett

“There is black. There is white. Gray is a cowardly excuse to mix our wants with our needs.”

— Kim Harrison

“I like edgy but classic looks - like Chanel mixed with Alexander McQueen. My personal style is edgier. My closet is just black, gray, and white. I'm more comfortable in darker colors and leather jackets.”

— Ashley Benson

“There are only shades of gray. Black and white are nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we try to judge things, and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, are as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We can only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we can no longer aim for the light.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“Everywhere I looked, I could see only shades of gray. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals in our minds, the standards by which we tried to judge things and map out our place in the world in relevance to them. Good and evil, in their purest form, were as intangible and forever beyond our ability to hold in our hand as any Fae illusion. We could only aim at them, aspire to them, and hope not to get so lost in the shadows that we could no longer see the light.”

— Karen Marie Moning

“He asked me, "what were the usual causes or motives that made one country go to war with another?" I answered "they were innumerable; but I should only mention a few of the chief. Sometimes the ambition of princes, who never think they have land or people enough to govern; sometimes the corruption of ministers, who engage their master in a war, in order to stifle or divert the clamour of the subjects against their evil administration. Difference in opinions has cost many millions of lives: for instance, whether flesh be bread, or bread be flesh; whether the juice of a certain berry be blood or wine; whether whistling be a vice or a virtue; whether it be better to kiss a post, or throw it into the fire: what is the best colour for a coat, whether black, white, red, or gray: and whether it should be long or short, narrow or wide, dirty or clean; with many more. Neither are any wars so furious and bloody, or of so long a continuance, especially if it be in things indifferent.”

— Jonathan Swift

“You were a warrior, Lantern. Such men are not renowned for understanding the infinite shades of gray that govern the actions of men. Black and white are your colors." "Scholars tend to overcomplicate matters," said Skilgannon. "If a man runs at you with a sword it would be foolish to spend time wondering what led him to such action. Was his childhood scarred by a cruel father? Did his wife leave him for another man? Was he perhaps misinformed about your intentions, and therefore has attacked you in error?" Skilgannon laughed. "Warriors need black and white, Elder Brother. Shades of gray would kill them." "True," admitted the abbot, "and yet a greater understanding that there are shades of gray would prevent many wars beginning.”

— David Gemmell

“When you're the victim of the behavior, it's black and white; when you're the perpetrator, there are a million shades of gray.”

— Laura Schlessinger

“It's easy to say you will do what's right and shun what's wrong, but when you get close enough to any given situation, you realize that there is no black or white. There are gradations of gray.”

— Jodi Picoult

“On a hairpin turn, above the dead forest, on no day in particular, a white Toyota crashed into a black Mercedes, for a moment blending into a blur of gray.”

— Neal Shusterman

“Everything is not black-and-white. I'm really interested in the gray area - not justifying it, not glorifying it, not condoning it, but at least having people see there's a genesis for every event in our lives. There's some divine order to it, whether it's ugly or beautiful.”

— Isaiah Washington

“I don't look at things in black and white. There are big gray areas. There's a lot of slippage.”

— Mark Bradford

“We want to live in the black and white, but we don't. The world is gray. And, I'm always fascinated by people who are clearly, 'This is black and this is white, and that's the way life is.' Life always has something to say about that.”

— Tony Goldwyn

“My natural gravitation is toward the gray and the black and the white and the burgundy. Sort of muted, cool colors.”

— Jessica Pare

“John Kerry doesn't think in terms of black-and-white. He's all gray, and he looks at all sides of the issues. That makes people think he likes to be devil's advocate. Whatever you say, he'll challenge you on.”

— Douglas Brinkley

“In tragedy, it's hard to find a good resolution; it's not black and white: it's a big fog of gray.”

— Paul Dano

“Entertainment came out of this thing called a television, and it was gray. Most of the films that we saw at the cinema were black and white. It was a gray world. And music somehow was in color.”

— Pete Townshend

“Three of them, dressed in silvery gray, on three horses-one black, one white, and the third red.”

— Holly Black

“People don't change. There are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. Black and white. I don't know where gray fits in, or if you can even live in that shade.”

— Julie Anne Peters

“The line isn't so black and white anymore. I'm pretty sure gray just became my new favorite color.”

— Colleen Hoover

“The tiles in the Merciless Mart are always black and white, and here they are in a checkered pattern. If I unfocus my eyes, I see exactly what the Candor don't believe in-gray.”

— Veronica Roth

“I'm trying to give people an idea of what black looks like and what white looks like before I introduce them to gray.”

— Gish Jen

“In my teens I saw the world in only black and white. Now I know that most things exist in a certain gray area. Though it took a while to get here, I now call this gray area home. I once believed that participating in a capitalist economy would be the death of me, but now realize that agonizing over the political implications of every move I make isn't exactly living.”

— Sophia Amoruso

“Some people never learn the art of compromise. Everything is either black or white. They do no recognize, or will not concede, that the equally important color gray is a mixture of black and white.”

— Waite Phillips

“The choice in politics isn't usually between black and white. It's between two horrible shades of gray.”

— Peter Thorneycroft, Baron Thorneycroft

“There's always the question of what is good and evil and the gray area in between where that most people live. In everyday life, things aren't black or white, but rather there's a lot of coping and really tough decision making.”

— Laura San Giacomo

“The gray area, the place between black and white - that's the place where life happens.”

— Justin Timberlake

“The most interesting thing about being alive is that there is no black and white; there are many shades of gray.”

— Tom Hiddleston