Dali Greets The World

“If you will study the entire series of cards [he had painted] you will find one theme runs through most almost all – the butterfly. The butterfly is not present only because it is in itself a thing of beauty. It is present because to one of the greatest Spanish mystics, St. Theresa of Avila, the butterfly was the symbol of the soul.

The ugly, ungainly caterpillar, our body, enters a form of the grave, the cocoon. Out of this death emerges the butterfly–beautiful, free, no longer earthbound. To me, as to St. Theresa, the butterfly is the soul of man.”