Butterfly Quotes

The mark of your ignorance is the depth of your belief in injustice and tragedy. What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly. (Richard Bach)
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly. View quote
Buckminster Fuller
Just living is not enough," said the butterfly, "one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower. View quote
Hans Christian Andersen
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. View quote
Nathaniel Hawthorne
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. View quote
Rabindranath Tagore
The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity. View quote
George Carlin
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. View quote
Richard Bach
Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. View quote
Muhammad Ali
All my life I've swam in the loo butterfly style. View quote
Faina Ranevskaya
When a small child, I thought that success spelled happiness. I was wrong, happiness is like a butterfly which appears and delights us for one brief moment, but soon flits away. View quote
Anna Pavlova
Why make so much of fragmentary blue In here and there a bird, or butterfly, Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye, When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue. (Robert Frost)
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty. View quote
Maya Angelou
A Chinaman of the T'ang Dynasty-and, by which definition, a philosopher-dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher. Envy him; in his two-fold security. View quote
Tom Stoppard
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. View quote
Zhuangzi
Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves. View quote
Drew Barrymore
She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly. View quote
Ken Follett
Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar. View quote
Cornelia Funke
To Beatrice--My love flew like a butterfly, Until death swooped down like a bat, As the poet Emma Montana McElroy said: That's the end of that. View quote
Daniel Handler
I had eventually come to understand that friendship was a delicate, gradual process that mustn't be rushed or seized upon but allowed and encouraged to take its course over time. I pictured it as a butterfly, simultaneously beautiful and fragile, that once afloat belonged to the air and any attempt to grab at it would only destroy it. View quote
Daniel Tammet
But the individual butterfly or earthquake remains just the unique existence which it is. We forget in explaining its occurrence that it is only the occurrence that is explained, not the thing itself. View quote
John Dewey
With respect to the use of this sparkling coloured material [butterfly wings, around 1955] – the constituent parts of which remain indistinguishable – with the aim of producing a very vivid effect of scintillation, I realised that, for me, this responds to needs of the same order as those that formerly led me, in many drawings and paintings, to organize my lines and patches of colour so that the objects represented would meld into everything around them, so that the result would be a sort of continuous, universal soup with an intensive flavour of life. (Jean Dubuffet)
Brussels is a gay little city that lies as bright within its girdle of woodland as any butterfly that rests upon moss. View quote
Ouida
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. View quote
Edith Wharton
Archer reddened to the temples but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock if it were left undisturbed. View quote
Edith Wharton
The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes The butterfly upon the road Preaches contentment to that toad. View quote
Rudyard Kipling