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“In this moment, regardless of what happened before or what may happen tomorrow, what is the very best thing I can possibly do, right now?”

“Good public relations are AA lifelines reaching out to the alcoholic who still does not know us.”

“If we expend even five percent of the time on Step Eleven that we habitually (and rightly) lavish on Step Twelve, the results can be wonderfully far-reaching.”

“Perhaps those who know just a little about AA think our meetings must become dull and monotonous and our talks collapse into tiresome and repetitious laments or tortured remembrances .... Not so! As AAs, we need these lifesaving contacts to support and maintain our happily found sobriety .... For us, our meetings are eternally new, each offering something -- whether happy or tragic -- to encourage, sustain, and reaffirm our precious sobriety.”

“We who have been helped by AA are as letters of God addressed to our friends and fellow men. By our attitudes, our speech and our behavior are we to show them the transforming power of AA's philosophy of life.”

“AA’s Twelve Traditions are little else than a list of sacrifices which the experience of twenty years has taught us that we must make, individually and collectively.”

“AA is no set of tablets handed down to some latter-day Moses -- but a continuing creative process in which we all take part, a perpetual journey from the known to the unknown, a truth ever-arriving through experience.”

“There are many kinds of spiritual experience. Some are like the conversions of the great religious leaders of the past; others seem purely psychological. Some are sudden or instantaneous; others are a gradual learning experience. But all of them, whatever form they take, have one effect: They make a person capable of doing something he could not do before.

“As Bill puts it, ‘When a man or a woman has a spiritual awakening, the most important meaning of it is that he has now become able to do, feel, and believe that which he could not do before on his unaided strength and resources alone.’”

“After endless voting on a title for the new work we had decided to call it The Way Out. But inquiry by Fritz M., our Maryland alcoholic, at The Library of Congress disclosed the fact that 12 books already bore that title. Surely we couldn't make our book the 13th. So we named it Alcoholics Anonymous instead! Though we didn't know it, our movement then got its name -- a name which because of the implication of humility and modesty has given us our treasured spiritual principle of anonymity.”

“Admitting I lack faith does me no harm ... being different, dissenting from views by a majority of my peers, is not a source of guilt.”

“Our AA Traditions are, we trust, securely anchored in those wise precepts: charity, gratitude, and humility. Nor have we forgotten prudence. May these virtues ever stand clear before us in our meditations.”

“Sometimes when I think I am having a bad day, I am really learning a hard lesson, cheap. And sometimes, when I think I am having a good day, I am really in trouble and just haven't recognized it yet. I'm really no judge at all of what kind of day I'm having.”

“In relinquishing some goals because of lessened physical energy, I have been freed to achieve other and more satisfying ones that a deeper and more extensive Me has always known it wanted.”

“The other day, I sent an AA friend on a job interview. He went to the wrong address and he lost the man's name. In another office, he stated his purpose, was offered a job, and came back with one better than the job I sent him to look for.”

“We are called to unity, not uniformity.”