Search

“The beauty of sobriety is that sometimes I am the one supported, and other times the one supporting. One act helps destroy my ego, the other my self-centeredness. I need to practice both actions if I want to survive”

“I don’t fear for the future because I am in the loving arms of AA today.”

“Always a heady wine, success may sometimes cause us to forget that each of us lives on borrowed time.”

“The next time you feel hurt, outraged, bitter or resentful – the beginning of many a slip as attested to by AA speakers – try to remember quickly that you haven’t been mortally harmed. In nearly all cases, it’s just a pain in your feelings!”

“One day, after sitting alone, soaked in tears and feeling empty, worthless, and crippled in the smallest task, I reached out and gave my phone number to someone else – they were hurting, too. In that simplest of acts, my world changed.”

“With the help of the Fellowship, the Twelve Steps, and a Higher Power ... I do not have to be a newcomer again.”

“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.”

“There has to be something to be grateful for if I am only willing to change my attitude and look for it.”

“Today, as I look back over 27-plus years of sobriety, I can simply thank Him for being wherever I am going before I even get there.”

“The compulsion among most of us to survive and to grow soon becomes far stronger than the temptation to drink, or to misbehave. Literally, we must ‘do or die.’ So we make the choice to live. This, in turn, means the choice of AA principles, practices and attitudes that can salvage us from total disaster by insuring our sobriety.”

“Over the years I've gone to different types of groups to meet different needs in my life or to share experience, strength, and hope about a particular problem I was struggling with. Some days I've been part of the solution for another suffering alcoholic; other days I've been the one who was suffering.

“Thanks to our Fifth Tradition, no matter what my needs or my location I can find an AA group where I can talk about -- and listen to -- not drinking one day at a time, practicing the principles in all of my affairs, and being happily and usefully whole.”

“While wealth and authority lie at the foundation of many a noble institution, we of AA now apprehend, and thoroughly well, that these things are not for us. Have we not found that one man's meat is often another man's poison?”

“The most beautiful gifts of my life come to me in packages I do not recognize at first glance. In fact, I often don’t see them until I’ve stumbled over them. Yet I know that when I go about my business in service to AA and to others these gifts will appear, usually in the most unexpected places.”

“We are not a sociological entity, although sociologists find us fascinating. We are not a therapy group, although remarkable healing takes place among us. And we are not a religion, even though some people want to see us as such ... We are a spiritual entity.”

“I have learned in the program not to listen to the voice of my ego when it starts whispering things.”