Widely credited to Maya Angelou and posted on her own verified Facebook page on 15 May 2013 ↗, during her lifetime — but no poem, memoir, essay or speech has ever been identified as its source, so authorship cannot be confirmed.
“We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through” widely attributed to Maya Angelou; no primary source has been located. Quotle.info
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In context
Evoking the world of Maya Angelou — poet, memoirist and activist. Theme: "We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The quote in its fuller form
Attributed to
Maya Angelou
Earliest web trace
Blog attribution, Aug 2011
On her own page
Facebook, 15 May 2013
Primary literary source
None located
We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through to achieve that beauty.
↑ the popular short version drops ‘to achieve that beauty’
The fuller circulating form ends with “to achieve that beauty”; the popular short version drops it.
Treat as a modern, in-copyright line credited to Maya Angelou (d. 2014). Because no original publication has been identified, exact rights and first-publication details are unsettled; quote and attribute with the “attributed” caveat noted here.
Context
Beauty and the cost behind it
The line lands because it names something we habitually skip: the butterfly is admired at the end of its transformation, not during the messy, dissolving pupal stage that produced it. Read as a metaphor for people, it insists that visible beauty, success or grace is the residue of unseen struggle — a theme that sits naturally alongside Angelou’s lifelong writing on survival and reinvention.
That thematic fit is exactly why the attribution is so sticky, and also why it should be handled with care: a sentiment sounding like an author is not evidence that they wrote it. The quote spread on greeting-card-style images and self-published notebooks well before any book could be cited, and to this day the databases that carry it — Goodreads ↗ among them — name no work at all.
We admire the butterfly and forget the chrysalis — which is also what happened to the quote’s own paper trail.
Why ‘Rainbow in the Cloud’ doesn’t settle it
The compilation most often cited for this line, Rainbow in the Cloud: The Wisdom and Spirit of Maya Angelou, was published by Random House in 2014, the year of her death. It is a posthumous gathering of sayings and excerpts rather than a first appearance, so even if the butterfly line sits inside it, that would not establish where or when she first said or wrote it — compilations of this kind routinely absorb lines that were already circulating on social media.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
Maya Angelou (born Marguerite Annie Johnson, 1928–2014) was an American poet, memoirist and civil-rights activist best known for I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) and poems such as Still I Rise and Phenomenal Woman. In her later years she was unusually active on social media, personally sending short, aphoristic missives, which is one reason so many inspirational lines — sourced and unsourced alike — now circulate under her name.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source — Chicago
Earliest documented in an unsourced blog attribution (Aug 2011) and on Maya Angelou’s verified Facebook page, 15 May 2013; no primary literary source has been located.
MLA (9th ed.)
Angelou, Maya. Facebook, 15 May 2013.
APA (7th ed.)
Angelou, M. (2013, May 15). [Facebook status update]. Facebook.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘We delight in the beauty of the butterfly, but rarely admit the changes it has gone through’?” Last verified 7 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/we-delight-in-the-beauty-of-the-butterfly-but-rarely-admit