We never taste happiness in perfection, our most fortunate successes are mixed with sadness.

The line expresses a classical, tragic sensibility: human joy is never unmixed, and even the outcomes we call “success” carry an undertow of loss, regret, or foreknowledge of change. It suggests that happiness is not a stable state to be possessed “in perfection,” but a fleeting taste inevitably complicated by the costs of achievement, the fragility of fortune, and the limits of human control. Read in a Corneillean key, it also resonates with the moral psychology of honor and duty: victories may be admirable yet emotionally expensive, because they require sacrifice—of love, innocence, or peace of mind. The quote thus frames happiness as inseparable from the tragic texture of lived experience.