To laugh often and much ... this is to have succeeded. Probably not from Emerson: here's the full quotation and the story.
Interpretation
Finding joy in laughter is a measure of success in life.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson suggests that true success is not merely about achievements or wealth, but rather the ability to experience joy and share laughter with others. It implies that a happy and fulfilled life includes frequent moments of laughter and appreciation of the simple pleasures.
In practice
In a speech about wellness, I said, 'As Emerson reminds us, to laugh often and much is to have succeeded in life.'
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do.
No money is better spent than what is laid out for domestic satisfaction.
my lips never know my problem they just always smile
Use, do not abuse; neither abstinence nor excess ever renders man happy.
Who is rich? He that is content. Who is that? Nobody.
Wine sets even a thoughtful man to singing, or sets him into softly laughing, sets him to dancing. Sometimes it tosses out a word that was better unspoken.
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