People look with sympathetic eyes only at the blossom and the fruit, and disregard the long period of transition during which the one is ripening into the other.
Interpretation
People often admire success while overlooking the hard work and time it takes to achieve it.
This quote highlights the tendency of people to only appreciate the final outcomes, such as beauty and success, without recognizing the lengthy and often challenging journey that leads to those results. It emphasizes the importance of acknowledging the effort and transformation involved in achieving notable milestones.
In practice
In a motivational speech about persistence and hard work.
There are two things in life you cannot choose. The first is your enemies; the second your family. Sometimes the difference between them is hard to see, but in the end time will show you that the cards you have been dealt could always have been worse.
It really felt like my generation was deprived of a future that we believed was ours. I don't mean some hugely privileged future where we all have gigantic houses. I mean having a job.
One's life, from being an exterior thing, grows inwards. Its intensity stays the same; and, d'you know, it's most mysterious, the corners in which the joy of living can sometimes hide away.
I became a man in New York. New York made me the musician that I am and the person that I am, so it's impossible for me to say I regret having lived there.
How good life is when one does something good and just!
Hey, look at this!" He holds up a glistening, perfect pearl about the size of a pea. "You know, if you put enough pressure on coal it turns to pearls," he says earnestly to Finnick. "No, it doesn't," says Finnick dismissively. But I crack up, remembering that's how a clueless Effie Trinket presented us to the people of the Capitol last year, before anyone knew us. As coal pressured into pearls by our weighty existence. Beauty that arose out of pain.
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