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“Self-justification is a universal destroyer of harmony and of love. It sets man against man, nation against nation. By it, every form of folly and violence can be made to look right, and even respectable. Of course it is not for us to condemn. We need only investigate ourselves.”

“Think, think, think before you make that angry comment or mail that bitter letter. How important is it?”

“It is not stupid to accept myself and others complete with our imperfections. It would be stupid not to.”

“I don't know the music, but there is sound -- sometimes rushing and furious, sometimes gentle and caressing. But always there's the sound of a master pianist at play, conducting some mad orchestra of life. I don't know what or why or how, but I know I'm here. And the best I can do is to find God's will for me.”

“‘Historians may one day point to Alcoholics Anonymous as a society which did far more than achieve a considerable measure of success with alcoholism and its stigma; they may recognize Alcoholics Anonymous to have been a great venture in social pioneering which forged a new instrument for social action, a new therapy based on the kinship of common suffering, one having vast potential for the myriad other ills of mankind.’”

“We work; we struggle; we will survive.”

“After several years of regular attendance at an Eleventh Step study, a simple meditation came to me that I think of as the ‘alcoholic's meditation.’ With each in-breath, I think, Welcome. With each out-breath, I think, Thank you. That leaves me fluctuating between acceptance and gratitude, which I recognize as two of the integral principles of Alcoholics Anonymous.’”

“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.”

“Nothing improves if you drink.”