Quotations about Butterflies (Part 2)

As I said in the previous post, this butterfly quotation post will be divided into two. And here it is, part two, finish :)

[N]ot 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, "Flying Crooked"

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

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, Stray Birds

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, "Get To Me"

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, "Autumn"

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, translated by Kenneth Rexroth

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, "Pod of the Milkweed"

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, "To a Steam Roller"

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

Source: Quote Garden