Butterfly quotes
592 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside butterfly — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Poems On Time The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf."
"My dad is a Chatty Cathy, the social butterfly; friendly; knows everybody in the whole world by six degrees; tells me that every performance is the greatest he's ever seen, every new outfit is the coolest. Constant cheerleader."
"For some time she observed a great yellow butterfly, which was opening and closing its wings very slowly on a little flat stone. "What is it to be in love?" she demanded, after a long silence; each word as it came into being seemed to shove itself out into an unknown sea. Hypnotized by the wings of the butterfly, and awed by the discovery of a terrible possibility in life, she sat for some time longer. When the butterfly flew away, she rose, and within, her two books beneath her arm returned again, much as a soldier prepares for battle."
"The thing about Proust is his combination of the utmost sensibility with the utmost tenacity. He searches out these butterfly shades to the last grain. He is as tough as catgut and as evanescent as a butterfly's bloom."
"...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron."
"If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name."
"My loathings are simple. stupidity, oppression, crime, cruelty, soft music. My pleasures are the most intense known to man: writing and butterfly hunting."
"Even the pictures I was doing at college - a little narrative based on a butterfly catcher, or a chimney sweep - the images were always telling stories. They were all scenarios and moods which I storyboarded and worked through - it's exactly what I do now."
"The most I can do is to acquaint you with the authority of your own psyche - to give you a trust in the nature of your being. For, if you trust what you are, you can never go wrong in whatever terms you use. You can fly through belief systems as a butterfly flies through back yards."
"Tel Aviv, Israel, me, Robbie Williams. I'm coming to see you. It's like a first date. I've got butterflies in my stomache, I can't wait. I hope you feel the same way too. There will be singing, there will be dancing, there will be banter, there will be love. Mainly from me, beaming it to you, from my heart into your heads and minds."
"Minimize your therbligs until it becomes automatic; this doubles your effective lifetime - and thereby gives time to enjoy butterflies and kittens and rainbows."
"I remember one thing that marred this time for me; the movie "Gone with the Wind." When it played in Mason [MI], I was the only Negro in the theater, and when Butterfly McQueen went into her act, I felt like crawling under the rug."
"Happiness is like a butterfly - the more you chase, the more subtle, but if you stop moving and quietly wait for it to land on you."
"When romances do really teach anything, or produce any effective operation, it is usually through a far more subtle process than the ostensible one. The author has considered it hardly worth his while, therefore, relentlessly to impale the story with its moral as with an iron rod-or, rather, as by sticking a pin through a butterfly-thus at once depriving it of life, and causing it to stiffen in an ungainly and unnatural attitude."
"Of all the butterflies that chose to stay, I’m in love with the one that got away."
"It was a completely new feeling for me–like someone had just released a million, tiny butterflies loose in my stomach, and they were feverishly flying up into my head and making me lose my mind."
"What is charm, it is not a moral quality, it is not intellectual for no man by much thinking is able to add a grain of it to his personality. One either has it or has it not, it cannot be acquired or even cultivated. It is not physical even, it seems to be added to the human personality, an aura, a glow, the gold dust upon a butterfly's wing, the bloom upon a peach."
"A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing."
"Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing procedures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly’s wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose."
"Hundreds of butterflies flitted in and out of sight like short-lived punctuation marks in a stream of consciousness without beginning or end."
