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“I borrowed others' faith for a long time, and now I'm beginning to get a bit of my own.”

"My stability came out of trying to give, not out of demanding that I receive."

“Through our failures and trials we get the opportunity to soundly test our merits and virtues.”

“Whereas I used to function at two speeds – fast and stopped – a daily fix of meditation averages those two extremes out to a more gentle and efficient cruise rate.”

“I have discovered a new way to learn – by shutting my mouth and listening ... It’s not so much what I’m doing as what I’m not doing. I’m not talking. So I’m open; I’m teachable.”

“I was so busy juggling the regrets of the past with the expectations of tomorrow I had no time for living in the present.”

“Personal glorification, overweening pride, consuming ambition, exhibitionism, intolerant smugness, money or power madness, refusal to admit mistakes and learn from them, self-satisfaction, lazy complacency – these and many more are the garden variety of ills which so often beset movements as well as individuals.”

“It is out of our discussions, our differences of opinion, our daily experiences, and our general consent that the true answers must finally come.”

“Only a gift given in love and gratitude is blessed to the giver and precious to the receiver.”

“In the life of each AA member, there still lurks a tyrant. His name is alcohol.”

“What I’ve had to figure out is that I can’t figure anything out.”

“My life and the lives of those around me do, in fact, form their own parts in a symphony of interaction.”

“The phrase ‘God as we understand him’ is perhaps the most important expression to be found in our whole AA vocabulary. Within the compass of these five significant words there can be included every kind and degree of faith, together with the positive assurance that each of us may choose his own.”

“I’ve likened that transforming instant, when despair gave way to a glimmer of hope, to a tiny flower sprung into bloom amid the bombed-out wreckage of my life. Thanks to AA, that tiny bloom was to become a garden.”

“Sobriety does interesting things to the mind – clears it up some, lets a bit of honesty and truth filter in, and begins to demand reality.”