Caterpillar Quotes
These inspiring caterpillar quotes can help encourage you to start something great.
A caterpillar spends almost all of its life in one place. Each one weaves a protective covering of silk around itself while it changes into a butterfly. Learn more about what makes the caterpillar’s life cycle uniquely inspiring within these quotes.
The best caterpillar quotes
Inspirational quotes can help encourage the pursuit of your passions and motivate you to never give up. Here are our choices for the best caterpillar quotes.
1. Inspirational caterpillar quotes
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
All human beings have the ability to transform like a caterpillar emerging from its cocoon and taking to the sky.
Jim Rohn
Just when the caterpillar thought “I am incapable of moving,” it became a butterfly.
Annette Thomas
God changes caterpillars into butterflies, sand into pearls, and coal into diamonds using time and pressure. He’s working on you, too.
Rick Warren
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 knew, they can do it at any time and in countless ways.”
Dodinsky
About hope
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was over, she became a butterfly.
Barbara Haines Howett
About change
Butterflies are not called butterflies overnight.
They have to undergo tons of changes in order to acquire that name.
Michael Bassey Johnson
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
Maya Angelou
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly.
R. Buckminster Fuller
About growth
Keep up your faith to go high and fly, even after so many pains and sorrow. You can turn from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Life gives you a second chance: a call to grow.
Ana Claudia Antunes
A season of loneliness and isolation is when the caterpillar gets its wings. Remember that next time you feel alone.
Mandy Hale
Failure is like a caterpillar before it becomes a butterfly.
Peta Kelly
See 173 Rabbit Quotes and Captions.
Motivational
Fighting has taught me that the caterpillar takes a while to turn into a majestic butterfly.
Jesse Taylor
You’re a little caterpillar inside your cocoon. Break out and fly!
Jonathan Nettles
When someone comes to you with big dreams, don’t be too quick to belittle their ambition and dreams. Inspire and help them in any way you can. Even the beautiful butterfly was once a caterpillar.
Rita Zahara
I would like to think that the singer is the butterfly, and the drummer was just the little grub in the ground, working to become a caterpillar.
Robert Wyatt
2. Caterpillar quotes about life
We are like caterpillars contemplating pupation.
Terence McKenna
Around us, life bursts with miracles, a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops.
Nhat Hanh
Know thyself. A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever studies himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who seeks to know himself would never become a butterfly.
Andre Gide
If everyone is speaking caterpillar, don’t be afraid to speak butterfly. When it’s time to awaken, nothing else will suit you.
Tama J. Kieves
Forgetting… is 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
For baby & children
Children are caterpillars and adults are butterflies. No butterfly ever remembers what it felt like being a caterpillar.
Cornelia Funke
Check out these inspiring ladybug quotes and sayings.
3. Caterpillar quotes about love
When I was just a cute little caterpillar, you loved me. So I became a butterfly so you would never leave.
Crystal Woods
Meditation is the process of transformation and beautification of soul from a leaf-eating caterpillar to a nectar-sipping butterfly. It grows with the wings of love and compassion.
Amit Ray
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
Everyone is like a butterfly, they start out ugly and awkward and then morph into beautiful graceful butterflies that everyone loves.
Drew Barrymore
4. Funny caterpillar sayings
The caterpillar does all the work, but the butterfly gets all the publicity.
George Carlin
I’m a social caterpillar. I am not a social butterfly.
Harry Turtledove
In order to butterfly kiss, does it require caterpillar lips?
Josh Stern
Well, I must endure the presence of a few caterpillars if I wish to become acquainted with the butterflies.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Why do the caterpillar and the ant have to be enemies? One eats leaves, and the other eats caterpillars. Oh, I see now.
Jack Handey
Afraid? Me? A man who’s licked his weight in wild caterpillars?
Groucho Marx
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
Cute saying
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
Short caterpillar quotes
Caterpillars can fly, if they just lighten up.
Scott J. Simmerman Ph.D.
Caterpillars are nature’s own vegetarians.
Anthony T. Hincks
If nothing ever changed, there would be no such things as butterflies.
Wendy Mass
It is in being the caterpillar that you become the butterfly.
John Harricharan
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the Master calls the butterfly.
Richard Bach
Caterpillar sheds it’s skin to find a butterfly within.
Donovan
When a caterpillar looks in the mirror, he sees a butterfly.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Remember, this is similar to the place where caterpillars go to grow their wings.
Necole Stephens
5. Caterpillar quotes about the stages of life
Soon enough we will become a butterfly, soon enough we will taste the rapture of being alive.
Elizabeth Lesser
One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and – pop! – out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.
Eric Carle, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
Although the butterfly and the caterpillar are completely different, they are one and the same.
Kendrick Lamar
It is all too common for caterpillars to become butterflies and then to maintain that in their youth they had been little butterflies. Maturation makes liars of us all.
George E. Vaillant
Chrysalis & cocoon
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
Why is a caterpillar wrapped in silk while it changes into a butterfly? So the other caterpillars can’t hear the screams. Change hurts.
Rory Miller
A caterpillar builds a coffin, a butterfly remembers a cocoon
Pochassic
Check out these inspiring dragonfly quotes.
Metamorphosis
Learn to appreciate the caterpillar and the whole process of metamorphosis! The beauty and lightness of the butterfly only exist after going through these phases.
Karina Fonseca Azevedo
The butterfly does not look back upon its caterpillar self, either fondly or wistfully; it simply flies on.
Guillermo del Toro
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
Everybody knows what a caterpillar is, and it doesn’t look anything like a butterfly.
Lynn Margulis
Self-realization is a strange term. You don’t actually realize yourself. If anything, you go away. The caterpillar enters the cocoon of meditation: A butterfly emerges, metamorphosis.
Frederick Lindemann
When a caterpillar becomes a butterfly, it takes all of its experiences and everything that lives inside itself and transforms into a beautiful creature. What people don’t always notice is the metamorphosis — the isolation, the discomfort, even the pain.
Terryca Taylor
Transformation
For only by abandoning its attachments and facing the darkness does the caterpillar’s body begin to spread out and its light, beautiful wings begin to form.
Julia Hill
Only those who stick around long enough to see the caterpillar turn into the butterfly actually get to witness the transformation.
Kristin Michelle Elizabeth
As the caterpillar undergoes transformation and emerges as a butterfly; likewise, character undergoes transformation through experiences, aspirations and beliefs. How will you emerge?
Lorna Jackie Wilson
Adding wings to caterpillars does not create butterflies. It creates awkward and dysfunctional caterpillars. Butterflies are created through transformation.
Stephanie Pace Marshall
When I think of mystery, I don’t think about myself. I think of the universe, like why does the moon rise when the sun falls? Caterpillars turn into butterflies? I really haven’t remained a recluse.
Bob Dylan
A great beginning is sometimes at the point of what you thought would be the end of everything.
Dodinsky
Becoming a butterfly
One can study a caterpillar forever and never be able to predict a butterfly.
R. Buckminster Fuller
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
If a caterpillar doesn’t know its future has wings, it hardly experiences itself as land-bound.
Robert Kagan
It’s only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.
Ram Dass
A caterpillar must endure a season of isolation before it turns into a butterfly. Embrace the time you have alone, it will only make you stronger.
Steven Aitchison
To her, it was like asking a butterfly what it remembered about being a caterpillar. She could fly now and nothing could touch her when she left the cocoon of her body behind at night.
Thomm Quackenbush
The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
Ponce Denis Ecouchard Lebrun
Butterfly quotes
The Caterpillar cannot understand the butterfly.
Timothy Leary
A caterpillar, after its deep slumber, ‘wakes up to reality’ to realize, that truth is not always bitter after all!
Manali Oak
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
Nature’s message was always there and for us to see. It was written on the wings of butterflies.
Kjell B. Sandved
Perhaps the butterfly is proof that you can go through a great deal of darkness and still become something beautiful.
Unknown
Butterflies are nature’s angels. They remind us what a gift it is to be alive.
Robyn Nola
More inspirational butterfly quotes.
6. Famous caterpillar quotes
The caterpillars of the commonwealth,
Which I have sworn to weed and pluck away.
William Shakespeare
Criticism often takes from the tree caterpillars and blossoms together.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Once I spoke the language of the flowers, Once I understand each word the caterpillar said, Once I smiled in secret at the gossip of the starlings.
Shel Silverstein
“Just living isn’t enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower.”
Hans Christian Anderson
As the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys.
William Blake
To regret the exchange of earthly pleasures for the joys of Heaven is as if the groveling caterpillar should lament that it must one day quit the nibbled leaf to soar aloft and flutter through the air, roving at will from flower to flower, sipping sweet honey from their cups, or basking in their sunny petals.
Anne Bronte
Caterpillar quotes from A Bug’s Life
Someday, I will be a beautiful butterfly, and then everything will be better.
Heimlich, “A Bug’s Life”
I’m finished! Finally I’m a beautiful butterfly.
Heimlich, “A Bug’s Life”
Caterpillar quotes from Alice In Wonderland
I am exactically three inches high, and it is a very good height indeed!
Absolem the Caterpillar (or The Blue Caterpillar), “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll and the Disney film
“Come back!” the Caterpillar called after her. “I’ve something important to say.” This sounded promising, certainly. Alice turned and came back again. “Keep your temper,” said the Caterpillar.
Lewis Carroll, “Alice in Wonderland”
The Caterpillar and Alice looked at each other for some time in silence: at last the Caterpillar took the hookah out of its mouth.
Lewis Carroll, “Alice In Wonderland”
We’re all vulnerable. Mix the wrong feelings together, the right kind of bad with the wrong kind of good, and you’ll wind up with a total breakdown.
Absolem the Caterpillar
From The Very Hungry Caterpillar book
“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, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
On Saturday, he ate through one piece of chocolate cake, one ice-cream cone, one pickle, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of salami, one lollipop, one piece of cherry pie, one sausage, one cupcake, and one slice of watermelon.
That night he had a stomach ache.
Eric Carle, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
He built a small house, called a cocoon, around himself. He stayed inside for more than two weeks. Then he nibbled a hole in the cocoon, pushed his way out and… he was a beautiful butterfly!
Eric Carle, “The Very Hungry Caterpillar”
Thank you for reading these inspirational caterpillar quotes and sayings. Here are more quote lists to check out:
By Greg Johnson | Published 3/3/2022
