Butterfly

The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun

Love is like a butterfly:
It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes.
~Author Unknown

I only ask to be free.  The butterflies are free.
~Charles Dickens

The butterfly’s attractiveness derives not only from colors and symmetry:  deeper motives contribute to it.  We would not think them so beautiful if they did not fly, or if they flew straight and briskly like bees, or if they stung, or above all if they did not enact the perturbing mystery of metamorphosis: the latter assumes in our eyes the value of a badly decoded message, a symbol, a sign.  ~Primo Levi

We delight in the beauty of the butterfly,
but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
~Author Unknown

Once I read a story about a butterfly in the subway, and today, I saw one.
It got on at 42nd, and off at 59th, where,
I assume it was going to Bloomingdales to buy a hat that will turn out to be a mistake
- as almost all hats are.
~Nikolaus Laszlo, Nora Ephron, and Delia Ephron, You’ve Got Mail

“I almost wish we were butterflies
and liv’d but three summer days
- three such days with you I could fill with more delight
than fifty common years could ever contain.”
― John Keats,
Bright Star: Love Letters and Poems of John Keats to Fanny Brawne