Quotes & Sayings About Butterfly Metamorphosis

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

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

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

I was ready for huge transformation, emerging from the chrysalis, like the butterfly, a true metamorphosis, alive in all my beauty. — Leeza Donatella

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

Self-realization is a strange term. You don't actually realize your 'self'. If anything, you go away. The caterpillar enters the cocoon of meditation: A butterfly emerges - metamorphosis. — Frederick Lenz

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

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

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

A metamorphosis ... The shining butterfly of the soul from the pupa of the body. Larva, pupa, imago. An image of art. — A.S. Byatt

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

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

Because one day I was going to have to go through a metamorphosis like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly — Gayle Forman

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

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

Lasting companies know how to reinvent themselves. Hewlett-Packard had done that repeatedly; it started as an instrument company, then became a calculator company, then a computer company. Apple has been sidelined by Microsoft in the PC business. You've got to reinvent the company to do some other thing, like other consumer products or devices. You've got to be like a butterfly and have a metamorphosis. — Walter Isaacson