فَلْيَضْحَكُوا قَلِيلًا وَلْيَبْكُوا كَثِيرًا
Let them laugh little and weep much.
The passage aligns two opposed pairs: laughing/weeping and little/much. A comparison exercise that says only “let them laugh and weep” preserves one opposition but removes the second, reducing the structural force of the balanced muqābalah.
A judgment about elegance should not be based solely on brevity. Identify the matching conceptual pairs and explain exactly which of them survives the edit, and which does not.