Youth is happy because it has the capacity to see beauty. Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.

The saying links “youth” less to chronology than to perception: happiness comes from a receptive, wonder-capable attention to beauty in the world. The second sentence reframes aging as a spiritual or imaginative diminishment rather than a biological fact—if one preserves the faculty of aesthetic appreciation (and, by implication, curiosity, openness, and tenderness), one retains an inner youthfulness. Read this way, the quote functions as a compact ethic of attention: to keep seeing beauty is to resist cynicism and habituation, the forces that make experience feel stale and time feel heavy. It also suggests that beauty is not merely encountered but actively “seen,” requiring a cultivated capacity.