A Quote by Timothy Leary

The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly

Timothy Leary

Quote Topics

Butterfly Cannot Caterpillar Understand

Quote Author

Timothy Leary
American - Educator
October 22, 1920 - May 31, 1996

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

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

You cannot direspect the caterpillar and rave about the butterfly.

Mark Jackson

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

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

John Harricharan

There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.

R. Buckminster Fuller

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

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

Kendrick Lamar

The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.

George Carlin

Since when does the butterfly ask about the caterpillar?

Cornelia Funke

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.