Butterflies are one of the world’s creatures with the most splendid wings. Each one has its own charm. With their brightly colored wings and fluttery flight, butterflies are considered a beauty by many around the world.
As spirit animals, butterflies embody personal transformation. They can go through life changes with such grace and lightness on they can possess.
Many cultures around the world believe butterflies to be souls of a recently deceased loved one. Black butterflies might also mean death is nearby, while yellow or orange ones are symbols of happiness, excitement, and passion. In China, butterflies represent long life. Native Americans believe that if you whisper a wish to a butterfly and it flies to the heavens, it will come true.
Find the strength to get out of your cocoon and spread your wings through some of the best butterfly quotes and sayings.
1. “Just as the bird sings or the butterfly soars, because it is his natural characteristic, so the artist works.” — Alma Gluck
2. “Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrest his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.” — Andre Gide
3. “I like to read books and be alone. I’m not social butterfly person.” — Hope Solo
4. “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
5. “We are closer to the ants than to the butterflies. Very few people can endure much leisure.” — Gerald Brenan
6. “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
7. “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” — Muhammad Ali
8. “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.” — Vladimir Nabokov
9. “Butterflies are always following me, everywhere I go.” — Mariah Carey
10. “It’s so bizarre, I’m not scared of snakes or spiders. But I’m scared of butterflies. There is something eerie about them. Something weird!” — Nicole Kidman
11. “After 12 years, the old butterflies came back. Well, I guess at my age you call them moths.” — Franco Harris
12. “I shall state silences more competently than ever a better man spangled the butterflies of vertigo.” — Samuel Beckett
13. “His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and he did not know when it was brushed or marred.” — Ernest Hemingway
14. “The trouble with most comedians who try to do satire is that they are essentially brash, noisy and indelicate people who have to use a sledge hammer to smash a butterfly.” — Imogene Coca
15. “If there is one creature that represents my essence, it’s butterflies.” — Patricia Velasquez
16. “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
17. “Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves.” — Drew Barrymore
18. “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore
19. “I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.” — Robert Wyatt
20. “Art is the fatal net which catches these strange moments on the wing like mysterious butterflies, fleeing the innocence and distraction of common men.” — Giorgio de Chirico
21. “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
22. “Realize what you really want. It stops you from chasing butterflies and puts you to work digging gold.” — William Moulton Marston
23. “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
24. “The least thing upset him on the links. He missed short putts because of the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows.” — P. G. Wodehouse
25. “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
26. “Not for a moment, beautiful aged Walt Whitman, have I failed to see your beard full of butterflies.” — Federico Garcia Lorca
27. “I dreamed I was a butterfly, flitting around in the sky; then I awoke. Now I wonder: Am I a man who dreamt of being a butterfly, or am I a butterfly dreaming that I am a man?” — Zhuangzi
28. “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” — R. Buckminster Fuller
29. “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
30. “What’s a butterfly garden without butterflies?” — Roy Rogers
31. “Never touch a butterfly’s wing with your finger.” — Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
32. “Is it sin, which makes the worm a chrysalis, and the chrysalis a butterfly, and the butterfly dust?” — Max Muller
33. “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.” — Zhuangzi
34. “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
35. “What the caterpillar calls the end of the world the master calls a butterfly.” — Richard Bach
