Life & Wisdom Quote by John Greenleaf Whittier

Austere, almost domestic in its phrasing, "God's colors all are fast" turns faith into a matter of pigments and permanence. Whittier, a poet steeped in Quaker plainness and moral urgency, avoids ornate theology; he reaches for the language of cloth and dye, the everyday test of what holds. "Fast" here isn’t speed but steadfastness: color that won’t run, won’t fade in wash or weather. It’s a small technical word that smuggles in a large claim about the universe’s underlying reliability.

The intent is devotional, but not dreamy. Whittier’s religious imagination often insists that the divine shows up as consistency in the real world, not as spectacle. By framing God as the guarantor of stable colors, he offers a rebuttal to a 19th-century anxiety that everything is changing too quickly: industrial churn, political fracture, moral compromise. The subtext is: human promises bleed; God’s don’t. Where institutions stain and launder their own histories, the divine palette stays true.

There’s also an ethical edge. Whittier, an abolitionist voice, wrote in a culture skilled at rebranding sin as custom. "Fast" becomes a quiet standard against that kind of rhetorical bleaching. If God’s colors are permanent, then moral distinctions aren’t merely fashionable shades. The line works because it is so spare: a single, stubborn sentence that treats endurance as evidence, and beauty as a form of moral law.