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"Alcohol in Latin is spiritus, and you use the same word for the highest religious experience as well as for the most depraving poison. The helpful formula therefore is: spiritus contra spiritum."

"I show up early, I am involved, and I reach my hand out to the next person coming though the door. It's amazing how very easy it is to make a difference for others and for yourself just by accepting the responsibility to pass the message on."

"Alcoholics Anonymous was nurtured in its early days around a kitchen table ... True, we have progressed materially to better furniture and more comfortable surroundings. Yet the kitchen table must ever be appropriate for us. It is the perfect symbol of simplicity."

"I do not agree that the newcomer is the most important member at any meeting ... Equally important are those old-timers who showed me the way, and any middle-timer who may be today suffering. If newcomers are indeed the lifeblood of AA, old- and middle-timers are its skin and backbone."

"I have learned how to place principles before personalities, begun to understand that it's okay for me to be wrong, and that it is also all right for me to allow others to be wrong and to make mistakes. Learning to let go is a huge part of service work on all levels."

"I have often seen our Society timid and fearful, angry and prideful, apathetic and indifferent. But I have also seen these negatives fade as the lessons of experience were learned and gladly applied."

"My recovery relies on the hands of many people being extended to me. The welcome I received was more than a word. It was a word followed by actions."

"I had been undergoing a spiritual experience without knowing it. My confused questioning about a Higher Power, my changed mental attitude, and even my physical recovery had all be part of a spiritual awakening. Without knowing it, I had been in contact with the source of life, whatever or Whoever that might be."

"Let today's troubles be sufficient to today."

"If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root of it some unhealthy dependency and its consequent unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these hobbling liabilities."

"Sometimes we register surprise, shock, and anger when people find fault with AA. We are apt to be disturbed to such an extent that we cannot benefit from constructive criticism. This sort of resentment makes no friends and achieves no constructive purpose. Certainly, this is an area in which we can improve."

"You never know until you go out to meet it what any given day is going to be, but the way you go to meet it surely makes a difference."

"I have had to face my past, one episode at a time, and become willing to look at the truth. I could feel the pain and fear, like trolls under the bridge, waiting to jump out and challenge my self-esteem."

"'Absolute humility would consist of a state of complete freedom from myself, freedom from all the claims that my defects of character now lay so heavily upon me. Perfect humility would be a full willingness, in all times and places, to find and to do the will of God.'"

"Some days I feel almost normal, almost sane."