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“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.”

“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.’”

“What unites all members on the program is a common sincerity. We are all seeking the truth; we are trying for honesty. In practice, any useful conception of God must relate to this idea of truth. Some people would say that God is truth -- no more and no less.”