Tao Te Ching
Butterfly
Subject of the "world's most famous dream" ( Chuang Tzu's), butterfly symbolism opens many wisdom windows and doors as these quotes attest. Butterflies represent the delicate beauty, sensitivity, and impermanence of life as well as the inevitable possibilities of transformation. Living from only one week to almost a year, they concentrate the experience of life. Changing from egg to caterpillar larva to pupa before finally becoming the winged adult; they act out as well as epitomize transmutation. Many cultures use them to symbolize rebirth and in modern times they symbolize transgender. The ancient Greek word for butterfly, psȳchē, translates as mind or soul. In Japanese culture, butterflies also represent the human soul and Diderot described them the same way.
Quotes (72)
“As the smith melts fragments of metal, fusing the into a single ingot, dissolve the fragments of your knowledge in the vast expanse of your mind's nature.”
“My heart was split and a flower appeared; and grace sprang up; and it bore fruit”
“Wake, wake up! See with your own eyes what all these years you longed for!”
“Not wanting anything to be different, we see the inner essence.”
“At 15, I set my mind and heart on learning. At 30, I stood on my own. At 40 I had no doubts. At 50 I knew heaven’s decree. At 60 my ears were in accord. At 70 I followed the desires of my mind -and-heart.”
“To live is to die, to be awake is to sleep, to be young is to be old, for the one flows into the other, and the process is capable of being reversed.”
“Chuang Tzu dreamed that he was a butterfly. When he woke up he wondered if was Chuang Tzu dreaming he was a butterfly or now a butterfly dreaming it was Chuang Tzu.”
“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.”
“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”
“Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it. Each of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see.”
“When the conscious spirit transforms into the primordial spirit, it attains an unending capacity for transformation and brings the six-fold present, the golden spirit.”
“The flame of pure awareness burns away all delusion.”
“The interaction of the yin and yang through different combinations of the five agents generates all things in a process of endless transformation.”
“Ah, butterflies now, dancing in air, lost along fragrant pathways;
Flitting, fluttering, see how they flow, painting the evening breeze.”
“Don’t dwell in appearances, be bounded by or settle into any place but rest from the remnants of conditioning and reach the limit in all directions illuminating fully what is before you as awakening blossoms.”
“You are our true life, luminous, wonderful, awakening the heart from its ancient sleep.”
“Just as many utensils are made from one metal so too are myriad entities made of the fabric of self”
“The feminine, the valley, the spontaneity of spiritual transformation, this subtle and profound way to wonder is the most powerfully creative principle”
“Consider your origin. You were not formed to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.”
“The winds of a garuda unfold within the egg... when the shell breaks, the garuda soars into the vault of the sky. Similarily spontaneously present awareness immediately arises in and of itself, naturally lucid.”
“The way of the Creative works through change and transformation, so that each thing receives its true nature and destiny and comes into permanent accord with the Great Harmony: this is what furthers and what perseveres.”
“Butterflies are but flowers that blew away one sunny day when Nature was feeling at her most inventive and fertile.”
“The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawn to which we are awake is there more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
“Happiness is like a butterfly; the more you chase it, the more it will elude you, but if you turn your attention to other things, it will come and sit softly on your shoulder.”
“Now would all the waves be women, then I'd go drown and chase with them evermore! There's naught so sweet on earth—heaven may not match it!—as those swift glances of warm, wild bosoms in the dance, when the over-arboring arms hide such ripe, bursting grapes.”
“We don't understand that life is heaven, for we have only to understand that and it will at once be fulfilled in all its beauty, we shall embrace each other and weep.”
“People become uneasy, the face of society changes, old beliefs are destroyed before new ones can be created… these are the symptoms and precursors of revolution that have preceded all the world’s great changes.”
“I must have flowers, always, and always... I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers.”
“The eternal forces of truth always work in the individual and immediately in an unsuccessful way, underdogs always until history comes—after they are long dead—and puts them on the top.”
“To exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”
“None but a poet can write a tragedy. For tragedy is nothing less than pain transmuted into exaltation by the alchemy of poetry.”
“We dream much of paradise or rather of many paradises in succession, but long before we die they are all lost paradises in which we would feel lost.”
“The charms of the passing woman are usually in direct ratio to the speed of her passing.”
“The ancients adorned their sarcophagi with the emblems of life and procreation, and even with obscene symbols... These men knew how to pay homage to death. For death is worthy of homage as the cradle of life, as the womb of palingenesis.”
“The more uncertain I have felt about myself, the more there has grown up in me a feeling of kinship with all things... that alienation which so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world, and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.”
“it is the tremendous experiment of becoming conscious, which nature has imposed on mankind, uniting the most diverse cultures in a common task.”
“Whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”
“The silkworm is the most ambitious of worms. Nothing but belly and mouth, it drags inself along, eaing, soiling, eating again, a filthy pipe with two holes. then suddenly all the food turns to silk. Man is the same.”
“I remember one morning when I discovered a cocoon in the back of a tree just as a butterfly was making a hole in its case and preparing to come out… I warmed it as quickly as I could and the miracle began to happen before my eyes, faster than life… and I shall never forget my horror when I saw how its wings were folded back and crumpled… It needed to be hatched out patiently and the unfolding of the wings should be a gradual process in the sun. Now it was too late… That little body is, I do believe, the greatest weight I have on my conscience. For I realize today that it is a mortal sin to violate the great laws of nature. We should not hurry, we should not be impatient, but we should confidently obey the eternal rhythm.”
“The lady butterfly is 15 times as long, and 10 times as heavy, as the male. Among insects, the female is almost always larger and stronger than the male.”
“Give me bitter years of sickness,
Suffocation, insomnia, fever,
Take my child and my lover,
And my mysterious gift of song —
So that the stormcloud over darkened Russia
Might become a cloud of glorious rays.”
“The butterfly was just a lowly worm in its beginning. The worm didn't live with the moment-to-moment expectation of sprouting wings and taking flight. He lived a useful and productive life, the life of a worm. And he had to die a worm in order to be born as an angel! The spinning of the cocoon is, in and of itself, remarkable. It is as wondrous as the emergence and first flight of the butterfly.”
“...most men and women will grow up to love their servitude and will never dream of revolution.”
“If you begin to understand what you are without trying to change it, then what you are undergoes a transformation.”
“I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.”
“Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.”
“To the enlightened man... whose consciousness embraces the universe, to him the universe becomes his 'body', while the physical body becomes the manifestation of the universal mind.”
“What torments me tonight is the gardener's point of view... When by mutation a new rose is born in a garden, all the gardeners rejoice. They isolate the rose, tend it, foster it. But there is no gardener for men... It is the human race and not the individual that is wounded here”
“Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.”
“When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness.”
“In the transmission of human culture, people always attempt to replicate, to pass on to the next generation the skills and values of the parents, but the attempt always fails because cultural transmission is geared to learning, not DNA.”
“The coming Buddha, known as 'The Great Loving One,'... The gesture of Setting in Motion the Wheel of the Law symbolizes what he will do when he comes to restore the purity of the Buddha's teachings.”
“At a particular moment, in an immaculately white alcove, a white skeleton appeared that tried to catch me. And then instantly everything around me became white.”
“The only other person I have met who talked as he [Pasternak] talked was Virginia Woolf, who made one's mind race as he did, and obliterated one's normal vision of reality in the same exhilarating and, at times, terrifying way.”
“He felt all at once like an ineffectual moth, fluttering at the windowpane of reality, dimly seeing it from outside”
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.”
“The ultimate idea of rebirth is not purely the idea of physical birth and death. Physical birth and death are very crude examples of it, actually. It's a changing, evolutionary process: there's nothing you can grasp onto; everything is changing. But there is some continuity, of course—the change is the continuity.”
“psyche, the Greek word for 'soul,' can also mean 'butterfly'... what depths of joy lie hidden within that pinpoint of a brain? The whole world contained in a garden, in a single flower! All time contained in a summer's day, and life one all-embracing multi-orgasmic fragrance!”
“Evolution doesn't mean progress. Which is more conscious, the butterfly or the flower?”
“There’s a point in everyone’s life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes, you have to grab it by the tail, grab it hard and never let go… They obliterate the stye they’ve worked in, and out of the ruins they rise up again.”
“One who desires unending praise and attention is like a butterfly trying to find the edge of the sky.”
“in the world of Generation Y people tend not to make definite arrangements when it comes to social life: decisions are made 'spontaneously' at the last moment. Maybe they'll come. Maybe they won't, especially if a better offer comes along. The instant text message has created an epidemic of non-commitment that masquerades as spontaneity.”
“When we wake up from our confused state of mind, that is enlightenment.”
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