Butterfly famous quotes
06-22-2025
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The butterflies I get are not if somebody boos me in the crowd, or somebody talks trash about me during the week, or somebody on ESPN rips me. It's the pressure that I'm putting on myself.
-- Aaron Rodgers -
If in 1989 I said, 'I have an idea: Bottle water and sell it. And charge more than a beer,' they would have chased me around with a giant butterfly net. The same with paying to watch a television station.
-- Adam Carolla -
You [Chopin] have in your fingers an orchestra of butterflies.
-- Adam Mickiewicz -
Some say it is best not to go near the center of time. Life is a vessel of sadness, but is noble to live life and without time there is no life. Others disagree. They would rather have an eternity of contentment, even if that eternity were fixed and frozen, like a butterfly mounted in a case.
-- Alan Lightman -
I still get butterflies when England are playing.
-- Alan Shearer -
Awakening is not a thing. It is not a goal, not a concept. It is not something to be attained. It is a metamorphosis. If the caterpillar thinks about the butterfly it is to become, saying ‘And then I shall have wings and antennae,’ there will never be a butterfly. The caterpillar must accept its own disappearance in its transformation. When the marvelous butterfly takes wing, nothing of the caterpillar remains.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
The apocalypse is now! Americans know this, that the only hope is the flying saucers. Do you know how I see the world? Like a person who is dying. It's a worm who is dying to make a butterfly. We must not stop the worm from dying, we must help the worm to die to help the butterfly to be born. We need to dance with death. This world is dying, but very well. We will make a big, big enormous butterfly. You and I will be the first movements in the wings of the butterfly because we are speaking like this.
-- Alejandro Jodorowsky -
Satire or sense, alas! Can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?
-- Alexander Pope -
Her delight in the smallest things was like that of a child. There were days when she ran in the garden, like a child of ten, after a butterfly or a dragon-fly. This courtesan who had cost more money in bouquets than would have kept a whole family in comfort, would sometimes sit on the grass for an hour, examining the simple flower whose name she bore.
-- Alexandre Dumas-fils -
The creative life of the commercial photographer is like the life of a butterfly. Very seldom do we see a photographer who is really productive for more than eight or ten years.
-- Alexey Brodovitch -
Love, as is told by the seers of old, Comes as a butterfly tipped with gold, Flutters and flies in sunlit skies, Weaving round hearts that were one time cold.
-- Algernon Charles Swinburne -
Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who've been in love with the wrong man too often.
-- Alice Hoffman -
You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.
-- Alice Hoffman -
I'm just a butterfly, a mourning cloak, sealed inside a cocoon with blnd eyes and stiky wings. And suddenly I wonder if the cocoons sometimes do not open, if the butterfly inside is ever simply not strong enough to break through.
-- Ally Condie -
Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.
-- Alma Gluck -
I like to feel the butterflies in the stomach, I like to go home and have a restless night and wonder how I'm going to be able to accomplish this feat, get jittery. That hunger and those butterflies in the stomach are very essential for all creative people.
-- Amitabh Bachchan -
Oh! To be a butterfly Still, upon a flower, Winking with its painted wings, Happy in the hour.
-- Amy Lowell -
His lashes, fluttered like butterfly wings. "I could've made you happy, dove." "You did," I whispered
-- Ann Aguirre -
The whole time I was hoping my silence would fit yours and exclamation marks would gently float across time and space so that boundaries would be crossed; the whole time I was praying you would read my eyes and understand what I was never able to understand. See, we were never about butterflies. We’ve always been about burning stars. All about us is unearthly and radiant.
-- Anna Akhmatova -
Beautiful thoughts flit across the brain, like butterflies in the sun's rays, and are as difficult to capture.
-- Anna Cora Mowatt -
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.
-- Anna Pavlova -
From the season I did the butterfly faux tattoos on the models on the runway, every collection we do has to have a butterfly t-shirt or trim or print. People come to me for butterflies!
-- Anna Sui -
Butterflies and birds are like one perfect teaspoon of creation.
-- Anne Lamott -
The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being.
-- Anthony de Mello -
We did that with people like Chris Rock, Woody Harrelson, and the environmentalist Julia Butterfly Hill.
-- Anthony Kiedis -
Outing someone is like ripping a butterfly from its cocoon. You can damage them for life and rob them of THEIR life changing experience of liberation. For a successful emergence THEY have to struggle through the cocoon of fear and shame. THEN they can fly.
-- Anthony Venn-Brown -
Grown-ups love figures... When you tell them you've made a new friend they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you "What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies? " Instead they demand "How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make? " Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
You're beautiful, but you're empty...One couldn't die for you. Of course, an ordinary passerby would think my rose looked just like you. But my rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she's the one I've watered. Since she's the one I put under glass, since she's the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she's the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she's the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she's my rose.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.
-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery -
In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
-- Anton Chekhov -
There is no reason to assume that the universe has the slightest interest in intelligence—or even in life. Both may be random accidental by-products of its operations like the beautiful patterns on a butterfly's wings. The insect would fly just as well without them.
-- Arthur C. Clarke -
...that was the first thing I had to learn about her, and maybe the hardest I've ever learned about anything - that she is her own, and what she gives me is of her choosing, and the more precious because of it. Sometimes a butterfly will come to sit in your open palm, but if you close your hand, one way or the other, it - and its choice to be there - are gone.
-- Barbara Hambly -
After ages during which the earth produced harmless trilobites and butterflies, evolution progressed to the point at which it generated Neros, Genghis Khans, and Hitlers. This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
-- Bertrand Russell -
You know those adages about smelling the roses and chasing butterflies? The markets are my butterflies and my roses.
-- Bill Gross -
I will try to cram these paragraphs full of facts and give them a weight and shape no greater than that of a cloud of blue butterflies.
-- Brendan Gill -
What makes a genius? The ability to see. To see what? The butterfly in a caterpillar, the eagle in an egg, the saint in a selfish person, life in death, unity in separation, God in the human and human in God and suffering as the form in which the incomprehensibility of God himself appears.
-- Brennan Manning -
The splendor of a human heart that trusts it is loved unconditionally gives God more pleasure than Westminster Cathedral, the Sistine Chapel, Beethoven’s “Ninth Symphonyâ€, Van Gogh’s “Sunflowersâ€, the sight of 10,000 butterflies in flight, or the scent of a million orchids in bloom. Trust is our gift back to God, and he finds it so enchanting that Jesus died for love of it.
-- Brennan Manning -
The person who kills for fun is announcing that, could he get away with it, he'd kill you for fun. Your...life may be of no consequence to anyone else but is invaluable to you because it's the only one you've got. Exactly the same is true of each individual deer, hare, rabbit, fox, fish, pheasant and butterfly. Humans should enjoy their own lives, not taking others'.
-- Brigid Brophy -
For years The National has been labeled as a gloomy kind of rock bandI think mostly because of Matt’s deep baritone voice, which even if he is singing about unicorns and butterflies, he just sounds sad most of the time.
-- Bryce Dessner -
Some people are settling down, some people are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.
-- Candace Bushnell -
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
-- Carl Sagan -
I am not so weak as to submit to the demands of the age when they go against my convictions. I spin a cocoon around myself; let others do the same. I shall leave it to time to show what will come of it: a brilliant butterfly or maggot.
-- Caspar David Friedrich -
life's kind of like a painting. A really bizarre, abstract painting. You could look at it and think that all it is, is a blur. And you could continue living your life thinking that all it is, is just a blur. But if you really look at it, really see it, focus on it, and use your imagination, life can become so much more. The painting could be of the sea, the sky, people,buildings, a butterfly on a flower, or anything except the blur you were once convinced it was.
-- Cecelia Ahern -
I will drop into your chest like a vegetal ambrosia. I will be the grain that regenerates the cruelly plowed furrow. Poetry will be born of our intimate union. A god we shall create together, and we shall soar heavenward like sunbeams, perfumes, butterflies, birds, and all winged things.
-- Charles Baudelaire -
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free. Mankind will surely not deny to Harold Skimpole what it concedes to the butterflies.
-- Charles Dickens -
I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.
-- Charles Dickens -
Musical ideas sprang to my mind like a flight of butterflies, and all I had to do was to stretch out my hand to catch them
-- Charles Gounod -
Hurt no living thing: Ladybird, nor butterfly, Nor moth with dusty wing.
-- Christina Rossetti -
You can't force inspiration. It's like trying to catch a butterfly with a hoop but no net. If you keep your mind open and receptive, though, one day a butterfly will land on your finger.
-- Chuck Jones -
If you have the freedom to fly, why not take the scenic route!
-- Claire Williams -
If you want to fly, you have to flap your own wings!
-- Claire Williams -
I hear the mad song of a little bird and crush butterflies between my fingers.
-- Clarice Lispector -
On those who overanalyze his music: When you tear the wings off a butterfly, it is no longer a butterfly
-- Claude Debussy -
Life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art.
-- Claude Simon -
In this sense love is of a different order to any other phenomenon, for it may be both an event and a sign of that invisible mechanism I spoke of before; perhaps the finest sign, the most certain. In it’s throes we need neither luck nor science. We are the wheel, and the man who profits by it. We are the star, and the darkness it pierces. We are the butterfly, brief and beautiful.
-- Clive Barker -
Of course it’s the apparently tranquil periods that deceive us. Though our instruments or our senses or our wits may not be able to see the processes that are leading toward these clusters of events, they’re happening. The star, the wheel, the butterfly—all are in a subtle state of unrest, waiting for the moment when some invisible mechanism signals that the time has come. Then the star explodes; the wheel makes poor men rich; the butterfly mates and dies.
-- Clive Barker -
The rattle of plastic keys reminds me of a squadron of butterflies failing to fight their way out of a paper bag.
-- Clive James -
If you have butterflies in your stomach ask them into your heart.
-- Cooper Edens -
Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.
-- Cornelia Funke -
Since when does the butterfly ask about the caterpillar?
-- Cornelia Funke -
And besides, look at elder flowers and bluebells-they are a sign that pure creation takes place - even the butterfly. But humanity never gets beyond the caterpillar stage -it rots in the chrysalis, it never will have wings.It is anti-creation, like monkeys and baboons.
-- D. H. Lawrence -
You know what it's like to feel anxious - it's horrible feeling anxious. It's stressful having that feeling, having butterflies in your stomach, even for a day, and you don't sleep at night.
-- Damian Lewis -
I did a butterfly show in Berlin, and we had a guy who's an expert on butterflies; who bred them all and who looks after them all in the space.
-- Damien Hirst -
Gray sail against the sky, Gray butterfly! Have you a dream for going. Or are you the blind wind's blowing?
-- Dana Burnet -
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
-- 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.
-- Daniel Tammet -
I would have liked to catch hold of sleep at least once, just as I had been resolved to catch hold of death one day, to catch hold of the wings of the angel of sleep when it came for me, to grab it with two fingers like a butterfly after sneaking up on it from behind. [...] My sleep game was practice for the grand struggle with death.
-- Danilo Kis -
I never had come up with a really profound and strong gesture - nothing like Julia Butterfly's. So I figured the best thing I could do was live by my beliefs. That's probably the most profound thing that anybody can do.
-- Daryl Hannah -
I don’t know [why we're here]. People sometimes say to me, ‘Why don’t you admit that the humming bird, the butterfly, the Bird of Paradise are proof of the wonderful things produced by Creation?’ And I always say, well, when you say that, you’ve also got to think of a little boy sitting on a river bank, like here, in West Africa, that’s got a little worm, a living organism, in his eye and boring through the eyeball and is slowly turning him blind. The Creator God that you believe in, presumably, also made that little worm. Now I personally find that difficult to accommodate…
-- David Attenborough -
How passionately we love everything that cannot last: the dazzling crystallory of winter, the spring in bloom, the fragile flight of butterflies, crimson sunsets, a kiss, and life.
-- Dean Koontz -
Your life will be transformed when you make peace with your shadow. The caterpillar will become a breathtakingly beautiful butterfly. You will no longer have to pretend to be someone you're not. You will no longer have to prove you're good enough. When you embrace your shadow you will no longer have to life in fear. Find the gifts of your shadow and you will finally revel in all the glory of your true self. Then you will have the freedom to create the life you have always desired.
-- Debbie Ford -
If the butterfly wings its way to the sweet light that attracts it, it's only because it doesn't know that the fire can consume it.
-- Deborah Harkness -
My friends back home call me a warrior. In fact I'm a butterfly-faced warrior.
-- DeeDee Trotter -
Let me walk through the fields of paper touching with my wand dry stems and stunted butterflies....
-- Denise Levertov -
Being present. The mind is like a butterfly that flits from one flower to the next. Seldom do we find ourselves nestled in the excuisite and eternal ocean of here and now. When you are, you can connect with your true self that is beyond the chattering of your mind. When you take the effort to focus your drifting consciousness to become fully awake to the present moment, you will discover the glorious light that dwells within you.
-- Denise Linn -
The difference between me and a butterfly is that the butterfly looks at a flower with no purpose in mind but to sip nectar. The flower feeds its body while for me the colours and shapes and scents of flowers feed my heart. But how arrogant of me to assume that the butterfly does not feel its miniscule heart also soar for no reason other than touching and being touched by beauty!
-- Densey Clyne -
In my world, everyone's a pony and they all eat rainbows and poop butterflies!
-- Dr. Seuss -
I've always loved butterflies, because they remind us that it's never too late to transform ourselves.
-- Drew Barrymore -
We gon' float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. AH! Rumble, young man rumble! AH!
-- Drew Bundini Brown -
In the year 2007, seals, otters, lions, turtles, frogs, apes, snakes, butterflies, polar bears, cheetahs, whales are disappearing along with their variously furnished homes: cloud forests, rain forests, ice pack, boreal forests, coral reefs, forests of deciduous trees, conifer and palm.
-- Eban Goodstein -
There are two bodies - the rudimental and the complete; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design.
-- Edgar Allan Poe -
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods
-- Edith Wharton -
When a butterfly flutters its wings in one part of the world, it can eventually cause a hurricane in another.
-- Edward Norton Lorenz -
The best speakers know enough to be scared…the only difference between the pros and the novices is that the pros have trained the butterflies to fly in formation.
-- Edward R. Murrow -
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body like the butterfly shedding its cocoon. It is a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, to understand, to laugh, and to be able to grow.
-- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross -
Death is simply a shedding of the physical body, like the butterfly coming out of a cocoon. . . . It's like putting away your winter coat when spring comes.
-- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross -
Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
-- Elizabeth Goudge -
...The simple little words came easily, fitting themselves to the tune that had come out of the harpsichord. It didn't seem to her that she made them up at all. It seemed to her that they flew in from the rose-garden, through the open window, like a lot of butterflies, poised themselves on the point of her pen, and fell off it on to the paper.
-- Elizabeth Goudge -
The great loneliness- like the loneliness a caterpillar endures when she wraps herself in a silky shroud and begins the long transformation from chrysalis to butterfly. It seems we too must go through such a time, when life as we have known it is over- when being a caterpillar feels somehow false and yet we don’t know who we are supposed to become. All we know is that something bigger is calling us to change. And though we must make the journey alone, and even if suffering is our only companion, soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.
-- Elizabeth Lesser -
There's a part of every living thing that wants to become itself: the tadpole into the frog, the chrysalis into the butterfly, a damaged human being into a whole one.That is spirituality.
-- Ellen Bass -
Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average life span is a mere five to fourteen days.
-- Ellen DeGeneres -
he sucked the nectar from her heart like a famished butterfly.
-- Ellen Hopkins -
A power of Butterfly must be - The Aptitude to fly Meadows of Majesty concedes And easy Sweeps of Sky -
-- Emily Dickinson -
I did great things in the theater. I did some nice roles, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly or La Vie en Rose. And I love my role in Frantic.
-- Emmanuelle Seigner -
Like a butterfly stuck in a chrysalis, waiting for the perfect moment, I was waiting for the day I could burst forth and fly away and find my home.
-- Emme -
There weren't butterflies in my stomach, there were fire breathing dragons.
-- Emme -
Twentieth-century art has allowed me to see things in a cryptic way. I love the butterfly's wings, which disappear when folded and when open leave this brilliant, intense pronouncement of nature, 'Here I am.'
-- Emmet Gowin -
He well knew his mind's natural tendency to be endlessly on a thousand subjects at once, to flit from this to that and to the next thing to no particular purpose--indeed, he called it his "butterfly mind.
-- Eric Metaxas
