Butterfly Quotes & Sayings
“May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun/And find your shoulder to light on/To bring you luck, happiness and riches./Today, tomorrow and beyond.” – Irish Blessing
“Butterflies are self propelled flowers.” – R.H. Heinlein
“If nothing ever changed,there’d be no butterflies.” – Author Unknown
“The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” – Attributed to George Carlin
“What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.” – Richard Bach
“Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.” – Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” – Rabindranath Tagore
“Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves.” – Drew Barrymore
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” – Richard Buckminster Fuller
“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” – Hans Christian Andersen
“Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes.” – Author Unknown
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” – Carl Sagan
“But these are flowers that fly and all but sing/And now from having ridden out desire/They lie closed over in the wind and cling/Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.” – Robert Frost
“I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It’s a misfortune that it is usually the other way round.” – Karl Kraus
“Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life. And everyone deserves a little sunshine.” – Jeffrey Glassberg
“The butterfly is a flying flower/The flower a tethered butterfly.” – Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” – Richard Buckminster Fuller
“They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.” – Edith Wharton
“With the rose the butterfly’s deep in love/A thousand times hovering round/But round himself, all tender like gold/The sun’s sweet ray is hovering found…” – Heinrich Heine
“The butterfly long loved the beautiful rose/And flirted around all day/While round him in turn with her golden caress/Soft fluttered the sun’s warm ray…./I know not with whom the rose was in love/But I know that I loved them all./The butterfly, rose, and the sun’s bright ray/The star and the bird’s sweet call.” – Heinrich Heine
“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” – Hans Christian Andersen
“I’ve watched you now a full half-hour;/Self-poised upon that yellow flower/And, little Butterfly!/Indeed/I know not if you sleep or feed./How motionless! – not frozen seas/More motionless! and then/What joy awaits you, when the breeze/Hath found you out among the trees,/And calls you forth again!” – William Wordsworth
“I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.” – Charles Dickens
“The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry: deeper motives contribute to it. We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.” – Primo Levi
“And what’s a butterfly? At best,/He’s but a caterpillar, at rest.” – John Grey
“Flowers and butterflies drift in color, illuminating spring.” – Author Unknown
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” – Carl Sagan
“This great purple butterfly,/In the prison of my hands,/Has a learning in his eye/Not a poor fool understands.” – William Butler Yeats
“Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.” – Elizabeth Goudge
“The butterfly, a cabbage-white,/(His honest idiocy of flight)/Will never now, it is too late,/Master the art of flying straight.” – Robert Graves
“The green grass and the happy skies/court the fluttering butterflies.” – Terri Guillemets
“Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.” – Andre Gide
“Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,/Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly/That flieth unto judgment without screen?” – Dante Alighieri
“Bees sip honey from flowers and hum their thanks when they leave./The gaudy butterfly is sure that the flowers owe thanks to him.” – Rabindranath Tagore
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” – Author Unknown
“Go on, hitch a ride on the back of a butterfly. There’s no better way to fly.” – Pat Monahan, Scott Michael Underwood, and James W. Stafford
“The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.” – Paul Erlich
“And the case of butterflies so rich it looks/As if all summer settled there and died.” – Philip Larkin
“A million butterflies rose up from South America,/All together, and flew in a gold storm toward Spain…” – Winfield Townley, Scott Philip Larkin
“In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with humans it is the other way around: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.” – Anton Chekhov
“The paired butterflies are already yellow with August/Over the grass in the West garden;/They hurt me. I grow older.” – Li Po
“This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man will never on his heap of mud keep still.” – Joseph Conrad
“Just like the butterfly, I too will awaken in my own time.” – Deborah Chaskin
“Moss covered paths between scarlet peonies,/Pale jade mountains fill your rustic windows./I envy you, drunk with flowers,/Butterflies swirling in your dreams.” – Ch’ien Ch’i
“Where have those flowers and butterflies all gone/That science may have staked the future on?/He seems to say the reason why so much/Should come to nothing must be fairly faced.” – Robert Frost
“As for butterflies, I can hardly conceive of one’s attending upon you; but to question the congruence of the complement is vain, if it exists.” – Marianne Moore
“We must remain as close to the flowers, the grass, and the butterflies as the child is who is not yet so much taller than they are. We adults, on the other hand, have outgrown them and have to lower ourselves to stoop down to them. It seems to me that the grass hates us when we confess our love for it. Whoever would partake of all good things must understand how to be small at times.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
“The tulip and the butterfly/Appear in gayer coats than I/Let me be dressed fine as I will/Flies, worms, and flowers exceed me still.” – Isaac Watts
“We are closer to the ants than to butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.” – Gerald Brenan
“Nerves and butterflies are fine – they’re a physical sign that you’re mentally ready and eager. You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that’s the trick.” – Steve Bull
“The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of butterflies in the adjoining meadows.” – P.G. Wodehouse
“It is necessary to write, if the days are not to slip emptily by. How else, indeed, to clap the net over the butterfly of the moment? For the moment passes, it is forgotten; the mood is gone; life itself is gone. That is where the writer scores over his fellows: he catches the changes of his mind on the hop.” – Vita Sackville-West
“I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.” – Chuang Tzu
Butterfly Proverbs
“If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies.”
“For a caterpillar to become a butterfly it must change.”
“We are all butterflies waiting to happen.”
“Today a caterpillar – tomorrow a butterfly. Don’t lose hope because you never know what tomorrow will bring.”
“Just when the caterpillar thought its life was over, it became a butterfly.”
“When you feel that you’re about to fail, it might actually be that you’re about to fly.”
“No one can do it for you, choose to use your wings.”
“ Life is like a butterfly – You go through changes before you become something beautiful.”
“It’s the ends of the world,” said the caterpillar. “It’s the beginning of the world,” said the butterfly.
“There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.”
“Never underestimate that power that is, and has always been within you.”
“How does one become a butterfly? You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.”
“Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that.”
“Don’t settle for being a caterpillar when you have butterfly potential. Allow God to transform you from the inside out.”
“Everything in your life is there as a vehicle for your transformation. Use it.”
“The struggle you are in today is developing the strength you need for tomorrow. Don’t give up.”
“After every storm there comes clear, open skies.”
“Have you ever seen a butterfly crawl back into its cocoon and become a caterpillar? Don’t go backwards.”
“Like a butterfly evolving, we must love each stage we pass through. Be not judgmental of yourself. You are becoming a wondrous butterfly.”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
“Just like the butterfly, I, too, will awaken in my own time.”
“Pass through each stage of your life with attention.”
“Like the butterfly, I have the strength and hope to believe, in time I will emerge from my cocoon … transformed.”
“The butterfly counts not the months but the moments, and has time enough.”
“The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one.”