Should you find yourself undergoing a metaphorical metamorphosis in your own life, we invite you to draw some inspiration from these cute quotes about butterflies. From short butterfly sayings perfect for an art project to lengthier quotations for journaling or to include in a card, this insightful collection of quotes about butterflies will help keep you motivated and remind you just how powerful transformation and growth can be.
100 Butterfly Quotes
- “You do not just wake up and become the butterfly. Growth is a process.” — Rupi Kaur
- “Butterflies are self-propelled flowers.” — Robert A. Heinlein
- “Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
- “The butterfly is a flying flower. The flower is a tethered butterfly.” — Ponce Denis
- “As with the butterfly, adversity is necessary to build character in people.” — Joseph B. Wirthlin
- “There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.” — Buckminster R. Fuller
- “Just like the butterfly, I too will awaken in my own time.” — Deborah Chaskin
- “Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.” — Naya Riviera
- “A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that next time you feel alone.” – Mandy Hale, The Single Woman: Life, Love, and a Dash of Sass
- “We can learn a lesson from the butterfly beginning its life crawling along the ground, then spinning a cocoon, patiently waiting until the day it will fly.” — Heather Wolf, Kipnuk the Talking Dog
- “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” — Muhammad Ali
- “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
- “’Just living isn’t enough,’ said the butterfly, ‘one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.’” — Hans Christian Anderson, The Complete Fairy Tales
- “How does one become a butterfly? You have to want to learn to fly so much that you are willing to give up being a caterpillar.” — Trina Paulus, Hope For The Flowers
- “Everyone is like a butterfly. They start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful, graceful butterflies that everyone loves.” — Drew Barrymore
- “Open your heart and mind like the wings of a butterfly. See then how high you can fly.” — Zeenat Aman
- “Failure is like a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly.” — Peta Kelly, Earth is Hiring
- “Happiness is like a butterfly, the more you chase it, the more it will evade you, but if you notice the other things around you, it will gently come and sit on your shoulder.” — Henry David Thoreau
- “If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.” — Wendy Mass, The Candymakers
- “We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.” — Maya Angelou
- “Be like a butterfly and a flower—beautiful and sought after, yet unassuming and gentle.” — Jarod Kintz, This Book is Not for Sale
- “Take time to be a butterfly.” — Gillian Duce, The Winning Game (Magic and Mayhem #2)
- “The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough.” — Rabindranath Tagore 24. “The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.” — Guillermo del Toro, RELATED: 100 Uplifting Quotes About Change
- “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
- “The butterflies…What an educated sense of beauty they have. They seem only an ornament to society, and yet, if they were gone, how substantial would be their loss.” — Phil Robinson
- “Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life. And everyone deserves a little sunshine.” — Jeffrey Glassberg
- “Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies, it creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.” — Stephanie Marshall
- “Butterflies are nature’s angels. They remind us what a gift it is to be alive.” — Robyn Nola
- “Love is like a butterfly, a rare and gentle thing.” — Dolly Parton, “Love is Like a Butterfly”
- “Soar up high with the beauty and grace of a butterfly.” — Unknown
- “A butterfly symbolizes acceptance of each new phase in life. To keep faith as everything around you changed.” — Lisa Kleypas, Rainshadow Road
- “I embrace emerging experience. I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.” — William Stafford
- “Although the butterfly and the caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.” — Kendrick Lamar
- “Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life. And everyone deserves a little sunshine.” — Jeffrey Glassberg
- “Butterflies are God’s confetti, thrown upon the Earth in celebration of His love.” — K. D’Angelo
- “Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases, and it pleases wherever it goes.” — Unknown
- “Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.” — Cornelia Funke, The Thief Lord
- “I only ask to be free. The butterflies are free.” — Charles Dickens, Bleak House
- “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
- “Go on, hitch a ride on the back of a butterfly. There’s no better way to fly.” — Train, “Get To Me”
- “When you find yourself cocooned in isolation and you cannot find your way out of darkness… Remember, this is similar to the place where caterpillars go to grow their wings.” — Necole Stephens
- “Just when the caterpillar thought “I am incapable of moving,” it became a butterfly.” — Annette Thomas
- “She is like a butterfly; beautiful to look at but hard to catch.” — Nikki Rowe
- “Like a butterfly stuck in a chrysalis, waiting for the perfect moment, I was waiting for the day I could burst forth and fly away and find my home.” — Emme Rollins, Dear Rockstar
- “A butterfly always reminds that there is always beauty at the end of all the pain.”– Unknown
- “When I was a girl, I would look out my bedroom window at the caterpillars; I envied them so much. No matter what they were before, no matter what happened to them, they could just hide away and turn into these beautiful creatures that could fly away completely untouched.” — Carin, Patch Adams
- “When the spirit of nature touches us, our hearts turn into a butterfly!” — Mehmet Murat Ildan
- “Don’t waste your time chasing butterflies. Mend your garden, and the butterflies will come.”— Mario Quintana
- “Love is like a butterfly, beautiful and delicate… If you truly care for it, you’ll do whatever you can to make it happy, even if that means letting it go.” — Scott Pemberton RELATED: 125 Quotes About Love
- “For our people, butterflies are a symbol of hope. It’s said that if you capture one in your hands and whisper your dreams to it, it will carry them up to the heavens so that the wish can be granted.” — Sherrilyn Kenyon, Retribution
- “When she transformed into a butterfly, the caterpillars spoke not of her beauty, but of her weirdness. They wanted her to change back into what she always had been. But she had wings.” — Dean Jackson
- “You’ve gotta be a caterpillar before you are a butterfly. Problem is, most people aren’t willing to be a caterpillar.” — Anonymous
- “The wings of transformation are born of patience and struggle.”— Janet Dickens
- “A butterfly is a miracle, a divine creation that fleets, propelling the caterpillar within, an array of predators it cheats.” — Unknown
- “Nature’s message was always there and for us to see. It was written on the wings of butterflies.”— Kjell B. Sandved
- “A caterpillar, after its deep slumber, ‘wakes up to reality’ to realize, that truth is not always bitter after all!” — Manali Oak
- “It has been said that something as small as the flutter of a butterfly’s wing can ultimately cause a typhoon halfway around the world.” — Unknown
- “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
- “We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” — Carl Sagan, Cosmos
- “If you smile when you see a butterfly, you have happiness in your soul.” — Diana Cooper
- “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
- “A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly." — André Gide
- “We crush the caterpillars then complain there are no butterflies.” — Unknown
- “Fighting has taught me that the caterpillar takes a while to turn into a majestic butterfly.” — Jesse Taylor
- “Butterflies can’t see their wings. They can’t see how truly beautiful they are, but everyone else can. People are like that as well.” — Sharifah Norhamidah
- “Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.” — Bradley Miller
- “Someday, I will be a beautiful butterfly, and then everything will be better." – Heimlich, A Bug’s Life
- “One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.” — Helen Keller RELATED: 125 Quotes About Hope
- “And when all the wars are over, a butterfly will still be beautiful.” — Ruskin Bond, Scenes From a Writer’s Life
- “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
- “Beauty is where the beheld butterfly disappears from sight.” — R.H. Peat
- “Proverbs are like butterflies; some are caught and some fly away.” — German proverb
- “We are but small butterflies in the garden of life.” — Carston D. Roach
- “Perhaps the butterfly is proof that you can go through a great deal of darkness and still become something beautiful.” — Unknown
- “To catch the butterflies and the rainbows of your dream, walk alone, keep faith in yourself, focus your energy and start the adventure.” — Amit Ray
- “Butterflies are like angel’s kisses sent from heaven.” — Malia Kirk
- “In mythology throughout the world, the butterfly represents the soul and its journey in this life and the next.” — Tom Frost
- “Spread your wings and prepare to fly for you have become a butterfly. Oh, fly abandonedly into the sun. If you should return to me, we truly were meant to be. So spread your wings and fly, butterfly.” — Mariah Carey, “Butterfly”
- “A butterfly is like the soul of a person, it dries out in captivity.” — Marlene Van Niekerk, Agaat
- “Butterflies are not called butterflies overnight. They have to undergo tons of changes in order to acquire that name.” — Michael Bassey Johnson, Song of a Nature Lover
- “The key was making sure that anyone you allowed to walk beside you didn’t get to decide which you were, and pin you down a like a butterfly in a case. The key was to know that you could always somehow find a way to reinvent yourself again.” — Jojo Moyes, Still Me
- “Like a butterfly, her wings unfolded.” — butterflies rising
- “Don’t wait for your wings, fight for them.” — Gayatri Pardeshi
- “To know God, watch a butterfly return to the same tree—after a year and a thousand miles.” — Jonathan Lockwood Huie
- “The butterfly said to the sun, ‘They can’t stop talking about my transformation. I can only do it once in my lifetime. If only they know they can do it at any time and in countless ways.’” — Dodinsky
- “The thing about butterflies, Mr. Crow, is that they need to be admired from afar.” — A. Zavarelli, Crow
- “When I was just a cute little caterpillar, you loved me. So I became a butterfly so you would never leave.” — Crystal Woods, Write Like No One is Reading
- “Butterflies are beautiful, but the process of emerging from the chrysalis and spreading your wings can hurt. But still, you will survive the transformation (over and over again) and you will fly. Remember this when it hurts the most.” — Jeanette LeBlanc
- “The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.” — George Carlin
- “They seemed to suddenly come upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in a winter wood.” — Edith Wharton
- “…Nine butterflies appear within an hour, not on the wing but in the word, bringing a message of transformation and hope.” — Carol Lynn Pearson
- “Beautiful and graceful, butterflies lift our spirits with their loveliness and lyric flight.” — Gloria B. Schlaepfer
- “Literature and butterflies are the two sweetest passions known to man.” — Vladimir Nabokov
- “Some things, when they change, never do return to the way they once were. Butterflies for instance, and women who’ve been in love with the wrong man too often.” — Alice Hoffman, Practical Magic
- “The Very Hungry Caterpillar story is about hope. You, like the little caterpillar, will grow up, unfold your wings, and fly off into the future.” — Eric Carle
- “Life is short. If you doubt me, ask a butterfly. Their average lifespan is a mere five to fourteen days.” — Ellen DeGeneres, The Funny Thing Is…
- “We are all butterflies. Earth is our chrysalis.” — LeeAnn Taylor
- “What if the change you are avoiding is the one that gives you wings?” — Unknown
- “Life without pain is a life spent in a cocoon. You gotta break the cocoon to experience your beauty.” — Shubhi Next, check out… 30 Ways To Change Your Life101 Quotes About Nature150 Good Morning Quotes to Start Your Day
