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"Ever so slowly, I could feel myself changing. Things that had seemed important were no longer important. There was inside me a warming, a softening, a stirring, as the petals of a rosebud stir almost imperceptibly into a blossom."

"We need to constantly scrutinize ourselves carefully, in order to make everlastingly certain that we shall always be strong enough and single-purposed enough from within, to relate ourselves rightly to the world without."

“A little voice deep inside me said, ‘Hello, I am here.’ It was a small voice, and sounded as if it were buried underneath the cushions of my couch. It was my soul ... I had forgotten it.”

“If the day comes that I do drink again, it will not be because I had no alternative. It will be because I had an alternative, provided by a loving God, but was unwilling to use it.”

“Through uncovering and admitting my character defects, I realized that I was no different than the people I was so afraid of. I understood that we were all suffering and that I didn’t need to disguise my authentic self.”

“We began to see adversity as a God-given opportunity to develop the kind of courage which is born of humility, rather than bravado. Thus we were enabled to accept ourselves, our circumstances, and our fellows.”

"We began to see adversity as a God-given opportunity to develop the kind of courage which is born of humility, rather than bravado. Thus we were enabled to accept ourselves, our circumstances, and our fellows.

"We began to see adversity as a God-given opportunity to develop the kind of courage which is born of humility, rather than bravado. Thus we were enabled to accept ourselves, our circumstances, and our fellows."

“One night after a Step Two meeting, I decided to find out what those courageous early members who put our Twelve Steps together really meant by sanity. I was a little surprised to find that my dictionary defined it as the quality of being sound of mind, sound of judgment, reasonable and rational in one’s thoughts ... As I sat there mulling over the definition, an idea occurred to me: ‘This is what I’m to be restored to -- sound, reasonable, rational thinking.’”

"One night after a Step Two meeting, I decided to find out what those courageous early members who put our Twelve Steps together really meant by sanity. I was a little surprised to find that my dictionary defined it as the quality of being sound of mind, sound of judgment, reasonable and rational in one's thoughts ... As I sat there mulling over the definition, an idea occurred to me: 'This is what I'm to be restored to -- sound, reasonable, rational thinking.'"

“One night after a Step Two meeting, I decided to find out what those courageous early members who put our Twelve Steps together really meant by sanity. I was a little surprised to find that my dictionary defined it as the quality of being sound of mind, sound of judgment, reasonable and rational in one’s thoughts ... As I sat there mulling over the definition, an idea occurred to me: ‘This is what I’m to be restored to -- sound, reasonable, rational thinking.’”

“Notes in the same key resonate together .... No matter how much continuous sobriety I have to my and AA’s credit, I am still only one drink away from a drunk, just like everybody else in these meeting rooms.”

“In the Twelve Steps, AA offers not a theory, not a hypothesis, not a pious hope, not -- thank God -- wistful or wishful thinking, but an historical record of how more than 25,000 [now over 2,000,000] alcoholics achieved sobriety.”

“Most of us do follow, in our personal lives, the Twelve suggested Steps to recovery ... We do this from choice. We prefer recovery to death. Then, little by little, we ... conform because we want to.”

“Our fellowship has been permitted to achieve -- though still in miniature -- the ‘one world’ dream of philosophers. Ours is a world in which we can hotly differ, yet never think of schism or conflict as a solution.”