Happiness Quote by Christina G. Rossetti

Rossetti’s line flatters resignation by dressing it up as good taste. “Forget and smile” isn’t just advice; it’s a moral posture, the kind Victorian culture prized in women especially: self-containment, pleasantness, suffering kept private. The syntax does the persuading. “Better by far” sounds like common sense, a measured comparison, but it’s really a firm directive. Two neat couples are offered - forget/smile versus remember/be sad - as if memory has only one emotional outcome and forgetting only one social reward. That simplification is the engine of the quote’s power.

The subtext is tender and slightly ruthless: your pain is real, but your public performance matters more. A smile becomes both consolation and camouflage, a way to spare someone else the burden of your grief and spare yourself the indignity of needing. Rossetti, who wrote frequently about devotion, renunciation, and the costs of desire, understood how easily “moving on” becomes a spiritualized form of self-erasure. The line can read like kindness; it also reads like training.

Context matters. Rossetti’s poetry often circles love that can’t be spoken or fulfilled, with religious discipline hovering in the background as an alternative vocabulary for loss. Here, forgetting isn’t ignorance; it’s an act of will, a chosen amnesia that keeps the world orderly. The quote endures because it offers a clean exit from messy feeling - and because it quietly exposes what that exit costs: the truth of what happened, preserved only if you’re willing to be sad.