self-centered

You can dress up greed, but you can__ stop the stench.

... there are other proud people who have low self-esteem. They feel they haven't lived up to their potential. They feel unworthy. They want to hide and disappear, to fade into the background and nurse their own hurts. We don't associate them with pride, but they are still, at root, suffering from the same disease. They are still yoking happiness to accomplishment; it's just that they are giving themselves a D- rather than an A+. They tend to be just as solipsistic, and in their own way as self-centered, only in a self-pitying and isolating way rather than in an assertive and bragging way.

At the point that it dawns on me that I am not God I have finally made room for God.

Your ability to see will never broaden when you only see yourself.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

One is not necessarily made self-centered because he is foolish, but one is very often made foolish because he is self-centered.

To make a choice not to sacrifice is to decide that I am better off allowing a life to perish than release the resources I possess that might allow it to thrive. And because of choices such as these, the life that I am really allowing to perish is mine.

It's okay if there isn't a God anymore, but I still want to respect something. I don't want to be the center of my own universe,

Your love life is insignificant when it comes to raising your children to be respectable human beings. The moment you see them suffer or lower their standards because of your selfishness, is the day you should realize that nothing matters more than them. You are not just the queen or king of your fairy tale. The real story of your life is the gift of time God gave you with them.

Yet, there is a sense of some deep sort that runs entirely contrary to human nature; that in putting ourselves first, we must by necessity put others first.

Some people are thoroughly self-centred. This thing goes with me. I need it for moral support.