Beauty and love pass, I know... Oh, there's sadness, too. I suppose all great happiness is a little sad. Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses-
Interpretation
True happiness is intertwined with sadness as beauty and love are transient.
F. Scott Fitzgerald reflects on the fleeting nature of beauty and love, suggesting that they contain an inherent sadness. This duality illustrates that with the joy of experiencing beauty or love comes the understanding that these moments are temporary, thus evoking an awareness of loss that accompanies true happiness.
In practice
This quote resonates in a speech about the complexities of love during a wedding ceremony.
Don't be so anxious about it,' she laughed. 'I'm not used to being loved. I wouldn't know what to do; I never got the trick of it.' She looked down at him, shy and fatigued. 'So here we are. I told you years ago that I had the makings of Cinderella.' He took her hand; she drew it back instinctively and then replaced it in his. 'Beg your pardon. Not even used to being touched. But I'm not afraid of you, if you stay quiet and don't move suddenly.
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
It was about then [1920] that I wrote a line which certain people will not let me forget: "She was a faded but still lovely woman of twenty-seven."
The words seemed to bite physically into Gatsby.
But you can love more than just one person, can't you?
A sudden gust of rain blew over them and then another - as if small liquid clouds were bouncing along the land. Lightning entered the sea far off and the air blew full of crackling thunder. The table cloths blew around the pillars. They blew and blew and blew. The flags twisted around the red chairs like live things, the banners were ragged, the corners of the table tore off through the burbling billowing ends of the cloths.
You have so much fun playing games. We all love basketball, so we never want the season to end, 'cause then it's five months of sitting around and watching the playoffs.
Money doesn't make you happy. I now have $50 million but I was just as happy when I had $48 million.
How to gain, how to keep, how to recover happiness is in fact for most men at all times the secret motive of all they do, and of all they are willing to endure.
Being content is perhaps no less easy than playing the violin well: and requires no less practice.
Only a man who is happy can create happiness in others.
Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.
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