butterfly quotes

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.

- Muhammad formerly  Cassius Clay Ali
c.1964  Of his boxing style. Quoted in G Sullivan Cassius Clay (1964), ch.8.

Orchidbreathing incense into butterfly's wings

- Matsuo Basho
c.1689  On Love and Barley: Haiku of Basho, no.166 (translated by Lucien Stryk).

The morals of a baboon and the guts of a butterfly.

-Truman Capote
Of Kenneth Tynan. Quoted in Gerald Clarke Capote (1988).

The dark notes rose everywhere, so dark, so sombre, they broke into a fountainlight as the rainbow sparkling and immaterial as invisible sources and echoes. The savannahs grew lonelyas the sea and broke again into a wave and forest. Tall trees with black marching boots and feet were clad in the spurs and sharp wings of a butterfly.

- Rolf Harris
  The Palace of the Peacock, ch.11.

The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth-point goes; The butterfly upon the road Preaches contentment to that toad. 470

- (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling
  'Pagett, MP'.

Let Sporus tremble'What? that thing of silk, Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk? Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel? Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

- Alexander Pope
  Of Lord Hervey.'An Epistle to DrArbuthnot', l.305^8.

An admiral red, whose only notion, (A butterfly poised on a pigtailed ocean) Is of the peruked sea whose swell Breaks on the flowerless rocks of Hell.

- Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell
  Fa c° ade,'En Famille'.