The terrible poverty of pride is that there is nothing that can be taken in selfishness which will exceed what is received when nothing is expected and everything is offered.

Purpose, meaning, and hope are the edge of a coin; on one side is imprinted the image of God; and on the other is self … As complicated as life seems at times, the mystery of fulfillment and the paradox of contentment are as simple as that.

What makes life complicated, I suspect, isn’t the choice between these two value systems and the paths they define, sin and holiness, so much as it is our unwillingness to make the choice between the two.

Thoroughly selfish individuals can be entirely happy. They will be unlikely to find life very meaningful.

To such individuals, meaning often seems accidental, coincidental, or tangential … The reason this is so is that selfish people will find life meaningful only when they are not themselves; when they forget their selfish desires and act in a manner more consistent with agape (selfless love).

Meaning seems accidental, coincidental or tangential to their lives because, by and large, selflessness is accidental, coincidental and tangential to their lives.

There is nothing unpredictable about meaning, only the presence of selflessness in the life of a selfish person.

Because I did not understand the difference between meaning and happiness, I did not appreciate that life could be meaningful without being happy. I didn’t understand that meaning and happiness are occasionally opposed, such that the self-sacrifice that yields meaning may come at the cost of the very things on which happiness most depends. I erroneously assumed that if I were unhappy then my life lacked significance.

Happiness fades by design, precisely because it’s a means to an end, not an end in itself. We continually need to meet our psychological, emotional, and physical needs to remain healthy. If one meal were enough to provide lasting happiness, we would slowly starve to death afterward …

Consequently, there’s a limit to our happiness, which is defined by the amount required to satisfy a biological need. Exceed this amount, and the result isn’t more happiness but the discomfort and disease that follow from overindulgence. While some may be good, more isn’t necessarily better, and too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.

Happiness is true, even though it fades, and meaning is also true, despite the fact that it endures. Those experiences that define what it most means to be human are true not because they endure, they are true because they are meaningful.

Being human is not about being happy, not because happiness fades, but because the apex of the human experience is not happiness but meaning. Meaning endures not because it is true but because it is not dependent on circumstance. Happiness is transient not because it is false but precisely because it is dependent on circumstance.

Each emotional experience is true in its proper domain. What makes one fleeting and the other lasting is not truth but the fact that one belongs to the temporal and the other to the eternal.