- 黄安 – 新鸳鸯蝴蝶梦
Huang an – Xin yuan yang hu die meng - New mandarin duck butterfly dream
- 昨日像那东流水, 离我远去, 不可留,今日乱我心, 多烦忧
- zuo ri xiang na dong liu shui li wo yuan qu bu ke liu jin ri luan wo xin duo fan you
- Yesterday is like the eastern flowing water that left me, went far away and could not be retained. Today my heart got messed with a lot of worries and troubles
- 抽刀断水, 水更流, 举杯消愁, 愁更愁, 明朝清风, 四飘流
- chou dao duan shui shui geng liu ju bei xiao chou chou geng chou ming chao qing feng si piao liu
- Pull out the sword cutting the water, however the water went flowing even more. Raise up the cup to diminish the sorrow, however the sorrow becomes even more sorrowful. Tomorrow’s cleansed wind will be floating everywhere
- 由来只闻新人笑, 有谁听到旧人哭, 爱情两个字好辛苦
- you lai zhi wen xin ren xiao you shui ting dao jiu ren ku ai qing liang ge zi hao xin ku
- Since long ago, only heard the laughter of new lovers. Who ever hear the crying of old lovers. Ai4 qing2 (feeling of love) these two words are so tiring
- 是要问一个明白, 还是要装作糊涂, 知多知少, 难知足
- shi yao wen yi ge ming bai huan shi yao zhuang zuo hu tu zhi duo zhi shao nan zhi zu
- Do we have to ask and get a clear answer or pretend to be confused. Knowing more or little, however it is hard to know when is enough
- 看似个鸳鸯蝴蝶, 不应该的年代. 可是谁又能摆脱, 人世间的悲哀
- kan si ge yuan yang hu die bu ying gai de nian dai ke shi shui you neng bai tuo ren shi jian de bei ai
- Look like a mandarin duck, a butterfly. These years should not have occurred. However, who can take away the misery of the human world
- 花花世界, 鸳鸯蝴蝶, 在人间已是癫, 何苦要上青天, 不如温柔同眠
- hua hua shi jie yuan yang hu die zai ren jian yi shi he ku yao shang qing tian bu ru wen rou tong mian
- Flower-like colorful world, mandarin duck and butterfly. In this mundane we already are crazy; why take the pain to go up the blue sky, we should rather tenderly rest together.
Later the symbolic meaning of Mandarin Duck is often used in traditional Chinese weddings as people believe that Mandarin Duck can bring happiness to the newly wed couple. The depiction of the ducks, no matter it is a painting or a carving, is believed to be able to encourage the love in one’s life. For the married couples, this will help the couple keep happay together and love each other more deeply.
Here is a article about mandarin duck:
A pair of Mandarin Ducks symbolize happiness in love and suggestive of romance, devotion, affection, conjugal fidelity, togetherness and enduring love. Mandarin ducks live in couples and mourn the loss of their mates, which is why the bird has long been regarded as the most traditional and the most potent symbol of love and married bliss in Feng Shui practice.
When placed in pair nearby their owners, Mandarin Ducks becomes a powerful cure to attract or enhance love and relationships. For singles, the pair of Mandarin Ducks will enhance your chances of finding love partners; for lovers, it will bring you marriage opportunities; and for married couples, a pair of Mandarin Ducks will hold out the promise of a marriage being gloriously happy with no separation between the spouses.
Continue reading this article at: http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?nav=messages&webtag=ab-chinesecultr&tid=2006
Butterflies in Chinese culture:
In Chinese mind, two butterflies flying together are a symbol of love. In Chinese culture, there is a famous Chinese folk story called butterfly lover — a Chinese legend of a tragic love story of a pair of lovers, Liang Shanbo (梁山伯) and Zhu Yingtai (祝英台), whose names form the title of the story. The title is often abbreviated to Liang Zhu (梁祝) and often regarded as the Chinese equivalent of Romeo and Juliet as in Shakespears’ famous play. The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi 庄子 who once had a dream of being a butterfly flying without care about earthy world, however, when he woke up and realized it was just a dream, so, he thought to himself “Was I before a man who dreamt about being a butterfly, or am I now a butterfly who dreams about being a man?”
There is an article titled: Zhuangzi and the bloody butterfly
The story of Zhuangzi and the butterfly must be one of the best known anecdotes in the philosophical literature. It is also, for me at any rate, one of the most annoying: the kind of philosophical whimsy that irritates rather than illuminates. But as is so often the case, it is when we are walking away from philosophical problems that we realise that they point, however unsteadily, to something we cannot entirely dismiss.
According to the Chinese philosophical classic Zhuangzi, the great Daoist thinker of that name fell asleep one day and dreamed that he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he did not know whether he really was a man who had dreamed he was a butterfly or whether he was a butterfly now dreaming he was a man. The story is intended as more than a charming episode in the life of a sage: it is meant to make a philosophical point about what we take to be real. Our dreams are utterly compelling, and so long as we are dreaming, we think they are real: there are, as Descartes said in his Meditations “no certain indications by which we may clearly distinguish wakefulness from sleep.” If last night I dreamed that I was giving a lecture wearing no trousers and was so convinced of this that I woke up sweating, how do I now know for sure that I was dreaming then? Is it not possible that I am dreaming now: dreaming that the trouserless nightmare was a dream? The general question – do I wake or sleep? – seems both valid and ultimately unanswerable. There appears to be no a priori proof that I am now awake and that last night I was asleep; and any empirical data to which I might appeal are compromised. Their apparent authority could simply be testimony to the persuasiveness of my dream.
Continue reading the article at: http://www.philosophynow.org/issue76/Zhuangzi_And_That_Bloody_Butterfly
The butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough. ~Rabindranath Tagore
May the wings of the butterfly kiss the sun
And find your shoulder to light on,
To bring you luck, happiness and riches
Today, tomorrow and beyond.
~Irish Blessing
Butterflies are self propelled flowers. ~R.H. Heinlein
If nothing ever changed, there’d be no butterflies. ~Author Unknown
The caterpillar does all the work but the butterfly gets all the publicity. ~Attributed to George Carlin
What the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls a butterfly. ~Richard Bach
But these are flowers that fly and all but sing:
And now from having ridden out desire
They lie closed over in the wind and cling
Where wheels have freshly sliced the April mire.
~Robert Frost, “Blue-Butterfly Day”
I saw a poet chase a butterfly in a meadow. He put his net on a bench where a boy sat reading a book. It’s a misfortune that it is usually the other way round. ~Karl Kraus
Beautiful and graceful, varied and enchanting, small but approachable, butterflies lead you to the sunny side of life. And everyone deserves a little sunshine. ~Jeffrey Glassberg
The butterfly is a flying flower,
The flower a tethered butterfly.
~Ponce Denis Écouchard Lebrun
Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. ~Nathaniel Hawthorne
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it’s going to be a butterfly. ~Richard Buckminster Fuller
They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods. ~Edith Wharton
With the rose the butterfly’s deep in love,
A thousand times hovering round;
But round himself, all tender like gold,
The sun’s sweet ray is hovering found.
~Heinrich Heine, “New Spring”
“Just living is not enough,” said the butterfly, “one must have sunshine, freedom and a little flower.” ~Hans Christian Anderson
Love is like a butterfly: It goes where it pleases and it pleases wherever it goes. ~Author Unknown
I’ve watched you now a full half-hour;
Self-poised upon that yellow flower
And, little Butterfly! Indeed
I know not if you sleep or feed.
How motionless! – not frozen seas
More motionless! and then
What joy awaits you, when the breeze
Hath found you out among the trees,
And calls you forth again!
~William Wordsworth, “To a Butterfly”
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
And what’s a butterfly? At best,
He’s but a caterpillar, at rest.
~John Grey
Flowers and butterflies drift in color, illuminating spring. ~Author Unknown
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ~Carl Sagan
This great purple butterfly,
In the prison of my hands,
Has a learning in his eye
Not a poor fool understands.
~William Butler Yeats, “Another Song of a Fool”
[N]ot quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures. ~Elizabeth Goudge
The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight.
~Robert Graves, “Flying Crooked”
The green grass and the happy skies
court the fluttering butterflies. ~Terri Guillemets
Know thyself! A maxim as pernicious as it is ugly. Whoever observes himself arrests his own development. A caterpillar who wanted to know itself well would never become a butterfly. ~Andre Gide
Do ye not comprehend that we are worms,
Born to bring forth the angelic butterfly
That flieth unto judgment without screen?
~Dante Alighieri
These wonderful quotes come from: