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“The alcoholic is in no greater peril than when he takes his sobriety for granted.”

“Every day, every meeting, there’s something more to learn.”

“Often simplicity yields to complexity as the human mind grasps a great revelation, and places its own particular interpretation upon it. All too often the revelation becomes lost in the maze of human ideas, interpretations, and suggestions. Thus have great movements risen, flourished for a season, and died. But AA has steadily progressed through the labyrinth of complexity, carefully avoiding luring temptations of wealth, professionalism, and fame as a healer of one of mankind's most deadly diseases. Dr. Bob who responded to that original phone call, and heard and accepted the message from Bill, has left ringing in our ears, the vital admonition: ‘Keep it simple.’”

“Let us of AA ... resolve that we shall always be inclusive and never exclusive, offering all we have to all, save our title. May all barriers be thus leveled.”

“If we fail to ‘repair,’ we can only impair.”

“There are AA emotions and attitudes that transcend language.”

“Our sobriety should be founded on ‘unselfish selfishness’ ... It’s not sound, we have been told, to try to stay dry for the sake of a wife or a sweetheart or someone else dear to us.”

“Let all of us AAs, whether we be trustees, editors, secretaries, janitors, or cooks -- or just members -- ever recall the unimportance of wealth and authority as compared with the vast import of our brotherhood, love, and service.”

“In our Twelve Traditions we have set our faces against nearly every trend in the outside world.

We have denied ourselves personal government, professionalism and the right to say who our members shall be. We have abandoned do-goodism, reform and paternalism. We refuse charitable money and prefer to pay our own way. We will cooperate with practically everybody, yet we decline to marry our Society to anyone. We abstain from public controversy and will not quarrel among ourselves about those things that so rip society asunder -- religion, politics and reform. We have but one purpose: to carry the AA message to the sick alcoholic who wants it.

We take these attitudes not at all because we claim special virtue or wisdom; we do these things because hard experience has told us that we must -- if AA is to survive in the distraught world of today.

“If we dwell on the past or the future, we put ourselves back into the torture chamber. We stop changing. Boredom, pain, and futility take over again. We have been ... We will be ... We no longer are. The 24-hour program disappears. Anxiety, anger, and a desire for revenge replace spiritual experience. Awareness and surrender cease. We are on a dry drunk.”

“A new chapter has once again started in my life -- a chapter that has no ending, a chapter that I did not write, but a chapter with many characters.”

“Without a connection to my Higher Power, I am the same old person with the same old defects, causing the same old pain in my life and others’.”

“We don't have to go to Akron, Ohio, to see Dr. Bob's memorial. Dr. Bob's real monument is visible throughout the length and breadth of AA. Let us look again at its true inscription -- one word only, which we AAs have written. That word is sacrifice.”

“I don’t just hear the slogans anymore; I feel them when I speak them ... They take hold of me; they change the course of my day if I let them.”

“Life in contented sobriety seems to be a matter of looking at the reality of myself in my attitudes, actions, and character rather than trying to run away from it.”