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?
When wishes are few, the heart is happy. When craving ends, there is peace.
Each nationality contains its centre of happiness within itself, as a bullet the centre of gravity.
I know what I want, I know where I'm going and I'm happy with what I am.
It isn't what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.
If I am happy in spite of my deprivations, if my happiness is so deep that it is a faith, so thoughtful that it becomes a philosophy of life. If, in short, I am an optimist, my testimony to the creed of optimism is worth hearing.
You ask me what I'd like to do that I haven't done and I say 'Nothin'!' I haven't any mountains to climb or oceans to swim. I've been an extremely blessed individual. ... I'm not clamorin' for more trinkets. If I were to die tomorrow, I could say I've had a good life.
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