A Quote by Matthew Macfadyen

The security comes, as an actor, in knowing that you're not in control. If you try to control your career, or how people perceive you, you'll make yourself unhappy, because life doesn't work like that. So much is luck. It's much better to let yourself off, to think, 'There's nothing I can do.'
Don't get yourself in certain circumstances or instances, because it's not a good feeling to be sitting in that chair where you've got 12 people that are in control of your life. You have an opportunity to be in control of your life for yourself by the decisions that you make.
You can control what you put in your body, how you take care of yourself, how much you work. You have to control what you can.
Get your emotions under control and your life under control. Work really hard and don't make a big deal out of yourself. Have humility. Believe in yourself. Don't get a fanatical fixation on a teacher.
I think that we Americans, in particular, tend to think too directly about problems. If there's a problem we want to basically go in with a screwdriver or else drop bombs on it. A better way to solve problems is to think indirectly and try to change the environment. So I think you can gain much better self-control not so much by working on yourself as by looking at the situations you're in and the people you hang around, and changing your environment.
Not caring what people think about you is so much easier said than done and I think that it's easy to be in school and kind of compare yourself to everybody else, you might think that you're weird because some people don't like you or because you just dont feel like you belong in your own skin in your school and I think that it's important to realize that there's absolutely nothing wrong with you you're worth so much. As time progresses you'll see that and you have to learn to love yourself and accept yourself because its your skin
It isn’t until you come to a spiritual understanding of who you are that you can begin to take control of yourself. As you learn to control yourself, you will get control of your life. If you want to move the world, you first have to move yourself.
I think that if you live long enough, you realize that so much of what happens in life is out of your control, but how you respond to it is in your control. That's what I try to remember.
Forget the resolutions. Forget control and discipline... too much work. Instead try experimenting. Go in search of something to fall in love with... something about yourself, your career, your spouse
You can control yourself if you really want to. I'll tell you how I know you can control yourself. If you were in a full fledged emotional temper tantrum in your house and I knocked on your front door..... Come on! Let me tell you what, you would get control of yourself, and it would only take a few seconds.
You can't control whether or not you have talent. You can't control whether or not your work will be recognized or valued. But what you can control is how much work you put your art-both in terms of creating it and in terms of getting it out there-and that is where I try to focus my energy.
I try not to live in the future too much; that can make you crazy as an actor. There are so many people who are obsessed about their career path, like it's something which you can control, which fundamentally you can't.
The great thing about chess is it's a game for oneself. You don't work on what you can't control, you just work on yourself. And I think if more people did that, we'd all be a lot better off.
It's such a luxury as an actor to think of your career as something you're choosing for yourself, because so much of the time as an actor you're just hoping that exciting projects come your way.
We cannot choose how many years we will live, but we can choose how much life those years will have. We cannot control the beauty of our face, but we can control the expression on it. We cannot control life's difficult moments but we can choose to make life less difficult. We cannot control the negative atmosphere of the world, but we can control the atmosphere of our minds. Too often we try to choose and control things we cannot. Too seldom we choose to control what we can ... our attitude.
What I want to tell you today is not to move into that world where you're alone with yourself and your mantra and your fitness program or whatever it is that you might use to try to control the world by closing it out. I want to tell you just to live in the mess. Throw yourself out into the convulsions of the world. I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't believe progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm telling you to live in it. Try and get it. Take chances, make your own work, take pride in it. Seize the moment.
In the theater, you're so much more in charge as an actor. For better or for worse, you know what the audience is seeing. But you can be acting your socks off on film, and then you see the movie, and the camera is on the other actor, or they've cut out the lines you thought were significant, or they've adjusted the plot. So much of it is out of your control.
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