Quotes & Sayings About Butterfly And Caterpillar

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

You will be astonished to find how the whole mental disposition of your children changes with advancing years. A young child and the same when nearly grown, sometimes differ almost as much as do a caterpillar and butterfly. — Charles Darwin

Caterpillars chew their way through ecosystems leaving a path of destruction as they get fatter and fatter. When they finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies. The caterpillar's immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar's immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup which the new cells recycle into their developing butterfly.

The caterpillar is a necessary stage but becomes unsustainable once its job is done. There is no point in being angry with it and there is no need to worry about defeating it. The task is to focus on building the butterfly, the success of which depends on powerful positive and creative efforts in all aspects of society and alliances built among those engaged in them. — Elisabet Sahtouris

Most of them would have nothing to do with a caterpillar, except watch it through its changes; but when at length it came from its retirement with wings, all would immediately address it as Sister Butterfly, congratulating it on its metamorphosis--for which they used a word that meant something like REPENTANCE--and evidently regarding it as something sacred. — George MacDonald

When someone comes to you with big dreams, don't be too quick to belittle their ambition and dreams. Inspire and help them in any way you can. Even the beautiful butterfly was once a caterpillar. — Rita Zahara

Do you remember how you felt at seventeen? I do and I don't ( ... ) Imagine you came from outer space and someone showed you a butterfly and a caterpillar. Would you ever put the two of them together? That's me and my memories. — Douglas Coupland

Butterflies prove that God gives second chances. Because a butterfly spends most of its life as a caterpillar, scooting along on the ground, barely getting by. When a caterpillar sees a butterfly he thinks how wonderful it would be to fly. And then one day he gets tired. Very tired. He builds a little room, curls up inside, and takes a nap. Deep in his heart he wonders if maybe that's all. Maybe life is over. But one day the caterpillar wakes up, and God has done an amazing thing. The caterpillar hakes off the little room and feels something on his back. This time when he goes a bit down the tree branch he doesn't scoot like before. He flies! — Karen Kingsbury

The concept of hard times resulting in a positive transformation is repeated in nature over and over again; it's why they say that a diamond is a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well! Think about how a caterpillar has to cocoon herself in darkness and wait, in a space which becomes far too small for her expanding wings. If you were to interfere with the process and help her out, she would never develop the strength she needs to fly; it's the struggling which makes her powerful enough to break free and become a butterfly. — Rosie Blythe

The caterpillar turns to liquid before turning into a butterfly. Liquid. Thus washing away any speck of his caterpillar self as he lies completely vulnerable to his environment in his chrysalis shell. One good solid gust of wind and the caterpillars boned. — The Hippie

Don't diss the caterpillar and then sweat it when it starts to turn into a beautiful butterfly. — Jessica N. Watkins

Caterpillar dun' become butterfly-caterpillar die so butterfly can be. A new thing. We all must let ourselves die to be what we will be. But we cling to what we know. — Ryan Winfield

We go through these metamorphous just like a caterpillar does before becoming a butterfly and the middle of that metamorphosis it always feels uncomfortable. — John Assaraf

Trust in Creation which is made fresh daily and doesn't suffer in translation. This God does not work in especially mysterious ways. The sun here rises and sets at six exactly. A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. A bird raises its brood in the forest and a greenheart tree will only grow from a greenheart seed. He brings drought sometimes followed by torrential rains and if these things aren't always what I had in mind, they aren't my punishment either. They're rewards, let's say for the patience of a seed. — Barbara Kingsolver

You had heard of a caterpillar that couldn't turn into a butterfly. And you would like to examine how it would feel to be denied such a beautiful thing. You would like to know how it feels for the caterpillar to watch other caterpillars transform while all the time knowing he would never have that opportunity. — Cecelia Ahern

One can study a caterpillar forever and never be able to predict a butterfly. — R. Buckminster Fuller

You cannot direspect the caterpillar and rave about the butterfly. — Mark Jackson

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

The Transformation from Chrysalis can take weeks, months or even years- mine took one year. And although I have become this person, I'm still in the midst of a Larger transformation, one that I won't recognize until I look back at me now and say"who was that girl?" We are constantly evolving; I suppose I have always known that, but because I always knew that, I feared stopping, and it is Ironic that it was only when I finally stopped that i moved the most. I know now that we never truly stop, our Journey is never complete, because we will continue to flourish- just as when the caterpillar thought the world was Over, it became a Butterfly. — Cecelia Ahern

Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn't look anything like a butterfly. — Lynn Margulis

Meditation is the process of transformation and beautification of soul from a leaf-eating caterpillar to a nectar-sipping butterfly. It grows with the wings of love and compassion. — Amit Ray

A butterfly does not wonder how it can stop being a caterpillar. It simply feels some feeling from within that tells it: isolate yourself in this cocoon and grow within it. It trusts that feeling. When it comes out, it is radiant and beautiful. All the little bug did was follow its nature. You are no different. — Vironika Tugaleva

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

The caterpillar dies so the butterfly could be born. And, yet, the caterpillar lives in the butterfly and they are but one. So, when I die, it will be that I have been transformed from the caterpillar of earth to the butterfly of the universe. — John Harricharan

Every time i see a butterfly, it reminds me of how precious life can truly be. To be able to turn from a caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly and fly away so freely and gracefully wherever she may please, without no one in the world to tell her what to do. I wait for that special moment in time when I get to live freely, without no worries, pain or tears. I just want to be happy. I want the laughter in the air without all of the pain. One special day I'll get to live my life just like that beautiful butterfly. I will no longer feel blue inside. — Michelle Knight

Keep up your faith to go high and fly, even after so many pains and sorrow. You can turn from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Life gives you a second change: a call to grow. — Ana Claudia Antunes

She said it was because one day I was going to have to go through a metamorphosis like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly and that scared me, so butterflies scared me. — Gayle Forman

For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, and there was only ever the butterfly. — Robert Jackson Bennett

How does one become butterfly?' Pooh asked pensively.
'You must want to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar,' Piglet replied.
'You mean to die?' asked Pooh.
'Yes and no,' he answered. 'What looks like you will die, but what's really you will live on. — A.A. Milne

The people thrown into other cultures go through something of the anguish of the butterfly, whose body must disintegrate and reform more than once in its life cycle. In her novel "Regeneration," Pat Barker writes of a doctor who "knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cat of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay." But the butterfly is so fit an emblem of the human soul that its name in Greek is "psyche," the word for soul. We have not much language to appreciate this phase of decay, this withdrawal, this era of ending that must precede beginning. Nor of the violence of the metamorphosis, which is often spoken of as though it were as graceful as a flower blooming. — Rebecca Solnit

Does the butterfly lose time in the months it grows from caterpillar to flying beauty? One day, I'm going to want to sleep twelve hours at a stretch and I won't be able to. I'm not losing time. I am going through a metamorphosis. — Jacquelyn Nicole Davis

If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon
you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you watch, the more mysterious the natural world becomes, and the more you realize how little you know. Along with its beauty, you may also come to experience its fecundity, its wastefulness, aggressiveness, ruthlessness, parasitism, and its violence. These qualities are not well-conveyed in textbooks. — Michael Crichton

During that long terrible ride to Munich, I finally swallowed the bitter pill of my lover's rejection and poisoned myself with it. I murdered the personality I was born with and transformed myself from a butterfly back in into a caterpillar. That night I learned to seek the shadows, to prefer silence — Edith Hahn Beer

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. — Ken Follett

Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. Thus the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar, perhaps it may in turn so entirely forget it was a butterfly that is becomes a fish. — Soren Kierkegaard

And I wonder if the caterpillar at the threshold of death ever knew that she would get metamorphosed into a butterfly that she could fly. — Chirag Tulsiani

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

Here is the amazing thing: the caterpillar and the butterfly have the exact same DNA. They are the same organism but are receiving and responding to a different organizing signal. — Bruce H. Lipton

Suppose we are all children in the eyes of the Lord. But when God points us in the direction of his plan and we accept it, we morph and transform like the caterpillar emerging after living so long in its cocoon. No matter what that butterfly does, it cannot return to the cocoon nor can it go back to being a caterpillar." She felt Alejandro squeeze her hand under the table. "I believe that when we follow God's will without question, that is the day when we truly become an adult in his eyes and, at that point, there is no turning back. — Sarah Price

If you have WANNA, you can do ANYTHING!! - The Caterpillar That Wouldn't Change — Nancy S. Mure

A seed is not an imperfect plant, and a caterpillar is not an imperfect butterfly. Each is the manifestation of a particular stage in the process of development. Similarly, while we may not have yet remembered or understood our gifts, it is not because we are imperfect, but because we have not yet matured into memory and understanding. — Robert A. Giacalone

I Name you Echthroi. I Name you Meg.
I Name you Calvin.
I Name you Mr. Jenkins.
I Name you Proginoskes.
I fill you with Naming.
Be!
Be, butterfly and behemoth,
be galaxy and grasshopper,
star and sparrow,
you matter,
you are,
be!
Be caterpillar and comet,
Be porcupine and planet,
sea sand and solar system,
sing with us,
dance with us,
rejoice with us,
for the glory of creation,
seagulls and seraphim
angle worms and angel host,
chrysanthemum and cherubim.
(O cherubim.)
Be!
Sing for the glory
of the living and the loving
the flaming of creation
sing with us
dance with us
be with us.
Be!"
- Madeleine L'Engle, A Wind in the Door — Madeleine L'Engle

The three states of the caterpillar, larva, and butterfly have, since the time of the Greek poets, been applied to typify the human being,
its terrestrial form, apparent death, and ultimate celestial destination. — Humphry Davy

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

To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night. — Thomm Quackenbush

Do you see the butterfly?" Suri grinned with enthusiasm.
"Yes, I see it, but - "
"So stunning and delicate; it's marvelous. No one can see a butterfly and not stop to admire it. I'd love to be one. To go to sleep and wake up a season later with such beautiful wings and the ability to flutter about. That's the most wonderful sort of magic, don't you think? To change, to grow, to fly. But ... " She paused. "I wonder what the cost would be." The smile diminished once more. "There's always a cost when it comes to magic. I suspect there is a great price to go from lowly caterpillar to glorious butterfly. — Michael J. Sullivan

When a caterpillar spins its cocoon, it goes through a transformative process and then emerges as a butterfly. Similarly, when we go through a practice of meditation and prayer, we loosen our egoic grip on a sense of self that is separate from the Whole and become vehicles of the emergent evolutionary paradigm of love, peace , compassion, wisdom, harmony and oneness that seeks expression on the planet. — Michael Beckwith

Love seems to beautify and inspire all nature. It raises the earthly caterpillar into the ethereal butterfly, it paints the feathers in spring, it lights the glowworm's lamp, it wakens the song of birds, and inspires the poet's lay. Even inanimate Nature seems to feel the spell, and flowers glow with the richest colours. — John Lubbock

There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly. Fashion is at once a captapillar and a butterfly, caterpillar by day, butterfly by night — Coco Chanel

Her world fragmented into dozens of sharp, cutting shards, shedding the salty blood and saltier tears that ringed the bitter cocktail of her despair. She was caterpillar and butterfly, both, caught in a cocoon of raw nerves and open sores; she was insanity, wrapped up in the thin, transient wrappings of a temporary lucidity; and she was afraid, because an innate desire lay in the bottom reaches of her psyche for the very poison that was killing her. — Nenia Campbell

You are born a caterpillar. If you wish to become a butterfly you must break from your shell and grow wings. — Chloe Thurlow

A butterfly does not return to a caterpillar after it is mature. We must learn to grow and evolve into a stronger, wiser and better version of ourselves. Life occurs in stages and taking a step at a time is key to learning and growing. — Kemi Sogunle

Does a caterpillar sit on the same leaf when it's a butterfly? No! It goes for a little fly and sees something of the world. Does the tadpole stay in the same pond once it's a frog? No! It stretches its legs, goes for a jump, explores other waters. Did Cinderella go back cleaning hearths once she married the prince? ... Transformation means moving forward. If a butterfly stays on the same leaf and a frog stays in the same pond, then they may as well have stayed a caterpillar or a tadpole. There was no point in metamorphosing. — Holly Smale

When a caterpillar bursts from its cocoon and discovers it has wings, it does not sit idly, hoping to one day turn back. It flies. — Kelseyleigh Reber

Life is so Changeable as the Caterpillar into a Butterfly and Everyone like to be so Free as a Bird. — Jan Jansen

In her novel Regeneration, Pat Barker writes of a doctor who 'knew only too well how often the early stages of change or cure may mimic deterioration. Cut a chrysalis open, and you will find a rotting caterpillar. What you will never find is that mythical creature, half caterpillar, half butterfly, a fit emblem of the human soul, for those whose cast of mind leads them to seek such emblems. No, the process of transformation consists almost entirely of decay. — Rebecca Solnit

Just as in the world of plants and animals nothing ceases to exist, but continually changes its form, the manure into grain, the grain into a food, the tadpole into a frog, the caterpillar into a butterfly, the acorn into an oak, so man also does not perish, but only undergoes a change. He believed in this, and therefore always looked death straight in the face, and bravely bore the sufferings that lead towards it — Leo Tolstoy

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

That author who draws a character, even though to common view incongruous in its parts, as the flying-squirrel, and, at differentperiods, as much at variance with itself as the caterpillar is with the butterfly into which it changes, may yet, in so doing, be not false but faithful to facts. — Herman Melville

Metamorphosis has always been the greatest symbol of change for poets and artists. Imagine that you could be a caterpillar one moment and a butterfly the next. — Louie Schwartzberg

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

This caterpillar does not just simply grow wings
First, it must alter its mind; transform the very being of itself
It must climb the tallest tree, the highest mountain
Swim the deepest of oceans
Walk through the fiercest of flames
And then, if it chooses, this caterpillar can become a butterfly — Aubrey Moore

Although the butterfly and the caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same. — Kendrick Lamar

I believe I'm a caterpillar buried deep down under the ground. The entire earth is above me, crushing me and I begin to bore through the soil, making a passage to the surface so that I can penetrate the crust and issue into the light. It's hard work boring through the entire earth, but I'm able to be patient because I have a strong premonition that as soon as I do issue into the light I shall become a butterfly. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar. — Cornelia Funke

Each of us may be a diamond-in-the-rough, needing only a muse and a change in circumstance to go from humble caterpillar to majestic butterfly." - Peter Whitmer, Ph.D. ~from The Inner Elvis: A Psychological Biography of Elvis Aaron Presley — Peter Whitmer