A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly.
- Andre Gide

I also had this artist friend who’d paint butterflies and things like that on my head.
- Persis Khambatta

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

After 12 years, the old butterflies came back. Well, I guess at my age you call them moths.
- Franco Harris

Butterflies are self propelled flowers.
- R.H. Heinlein

I only ask to be free.  The butterflies are free.
- Charles Dickens

I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.
- Samuel Beckett

What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly.
- Richard Bach

First round of the tournament being a Major, I think the butterflies were a little different than that.
- Karrie Webb

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one.  It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where, I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake – as almost all hats are.
- Nikolaus Laszlo

Some people are settling down, some people are settling and some people refuse to settle for anything less than butterflies.
- Sarah Jessica Parker

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 gold-barr’d butterflies to and from And over the waterside wander’d and wove As heedless and idle as clouds that rove And drift by the peaks of perpetual snow.
- Joaquin Miller

Flowers and butterflies drift in color illuminating spring.
- Author Unknown

Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne

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

No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees, No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds.
- Thomas Hood

Love is like a butterfly:  It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes.
- Author Unknown

The fluttering of a butterfly’s wings can effect climate changes on the other side of the planet.
- Paul Erlich

I’ll be floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.
- Muhammad Ali

And the case of butterflies so rich it looks As if all summer settled there and died.
- Philip Larkin

The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.
- Rabindranath Tagore

I’d be a butterfly, born in a bower, Where roses and lilies and violets meet.
- Thomas Haynes Bayly

The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
- George Carlin

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
- Richard Buckminster Fuller

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

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.
- Carl Sagan

I like it’s not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that.
- Gene Wilder

Butterflies are always following me, everywhere I go.
- Mariah Carey

I get terrible butterflies. Before I go onstage, I’ll have to freak out for five minutes. I scream. It seems to help.
- Josh Groban

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 love that feeling of being in love, the effect of having butterflies when you wake up in the morning. That is special.
- Jennifer Aniston

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.Ê You have to get the butterflies to fly in formation, that’s the trick.
- Steve Bul

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

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

Men pass in front of our eyes like butterflies, creatures of a brief season. We love them; they are brave, proud, beautiful, clever; and they die almost at once. They die so soon that our hearts are continually racked with pain.
- Philip Pullman

Butterflies… not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
- Elizabeth Goudge

Realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold.
- William Moulton Marston

Far out at sea,- the sun was high, While veer’d the wind and flapped the sail, We saw a snow-white butterfly Dancing before the fitful gale, Far out at sea.
- Richard Hengist Horne