Opportunities fly by while we sit regretting the chances we have lost, and the happiness that comes to us we heed not, because of the happiness that is gone.

Jerome’s sentence laments a common human habit: living in the past so intensely that the present becomes invisible. By “opportunities” that “fly by,” he evokes time’s irreversibility—chances do not wait for our readiness. Regret, in this framing, is not merely sorrow for what is lost; it is an active distraction that consumes attention and prevents gratitude for what remains. The line also suggests a paradox of comparison: present joys are discounted because they cannot compete with an idealized memory of “the happiness that is gone.” The moral pressure is toward attentiveness—meeting life as it is now, rather than as it was or might have been.