Alan Ball Quotes

I really feel that the best actors out there are very centric. They're really connected. They're not in a, 'What about me' state, and I think that's a good lesson in life.

Sometimes you have to take the focus off of you and put it on someone else and it's funny what you can accomplish and how much strength you really have.

Whoever loves becomes humble. Those who love have, so to speak, pawned a part of their narcissism.

I've certainly had a lot of experiences in my life where I was much too self-centered.

I don't have an ego that makes me believe the world revolves around me. I am not self-absorbed.

I guess real maturity, which most of us never achieve, is when you realize that you're not the center of the universe.

My strength needs no victims. My strength is my compassion.

Be kind to all and severe to thyself.

We never know who we are going to be until we are tested, but perhaps we can test ourselves without going to the extremes of war. Perhaps we can be kinder now, live with less now, reach out to others now - and build an inner reserve of a strong identity that will hold us up even when everything else falls away.

Good character consists of recognizing the selfishness that inheres in each of us and trying to balance it against the altruism to which we should all aspire. It is a difficult balance to strike, but no definition of goodness can be complete without it.

The leader who exercises power with honor will work from the inside out, starting with himself.

I do get angry some time, but if I let that feeling take over it would only cloud my thinking and disable me from making the right decision when it counts the most. I just try to think about my mother, children, God, and of course my freedom.

Wisdom ceases to be wisdom when it becomes too proud to weep, too grave to laugh, and too selfish to seek other than itself.

My ego every day is more and more polite. I tame it.

To be compassionate is not a joke. It's not that simple. One has to discover a certain bigness in oneself. That bigness should be centered on oneself, not in terms of money, not in terms of power you wield, not in terms of any status that you can command in the society, but it should be centered on oneself.

We must master our egoism, and through this mastery, step outside ourselves and educate ourselves in giving. Fasting requires that we rediscover all that is alive around us, and reconcile ourselves with our environment.

Sensitiveness is closely allied to egotism; and excessive sensibility is only another name for morbid self-consciousness. The cure for tender sensibilities is to make more of our objects and less of our selves.

Who among us has the strength to oppose petty egoism, those petty good feelings, pity and remorse?

You have to find the peace and patience within yourself to be a model and an example to others and not judge.

Pope Francis reminds us of Pope John XXIII because both men share the same lack of self-consciousness, and neither needs to keep his guard up through the use of psychological defenses such as rationalization, projection or intellectualization.

For myself, suffering doesnt make me a good person; it makes me selfish. Why do we think that people who have less should find it edifying?

Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

Basically you have to suppress your own ambitions in order to be who you need to be.

The first test of a truly great man is his humility. By humility I don't mean doubt of his powers or hesitation in speaking his opinion, but merely an understanding of the relationship of what he can say and what he can do.

We have to humble ourselves and the way you do that is by serving other people.