A Quote by Humphry Davy

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

Quote Author

Humphry Davy
British - Scientist
December 17, 1778 - May 29, 1829

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

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

Forgettingis a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.

Robert Jackson Bennett

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

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 caterpillar and a butterfly, caterpillar by day, butterfly by night.

Coco Chanel

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

In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.

Anton Chekhov

The butterfly in a caterpillar: the eagle in an egg; the saint in a selfish human being.

Anthony de Mello

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

Since when does the butterfly ask about the caterpillar?

Cornelia Funke

It is in being the caterpillar that you become the butterfly.

John Harricharan

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 for 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.

Pat Barker

I confess to being something of a philosophical butterfly. The world is full of so many interesting questions, and although my greatest passion is for some form of applied ethics, that leaves me with oodles of possibilities, many of which I have never had the time or opportunity to explore in great depth.