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“We are losing all fear of those violent emotional storms which sometimes cross our alcoholic world; perhaps it bespeaks our confidence that every storm will be followed by a calm; a calm which is more understanding, more compassionate, more tolerant than any we ever knew before.”

“In AA, we discover that it is impossible to give without receiving, or receive without giving.”

“I can’t imagine anything that would make me so mad, glad, or sad that I would want to go back to what I was before AA.”

“My emotional bottom came in sobriety ... I actually had to sit and feel all those feelings I had worked so hard to drown out with alcohol.”

“I’m better able to love people when the storm of my judgmental mind settles, when I understand and empathize rather than criticize and condemn.”

“As AA grows, it is impossible to know everyone, but if I try to relate myself with just one other person, something will happen, something remarkable.”

“When we early AAs got our first glimmer of how spiritually prideful we could be, we coined this expression: ‘Don’t try to get too damned good by Thursday!’”

“One of the first insights Dr. Bob and I shared was that all true communication must be founded on mutual need. Never could we talk down to anyone, certainly not to a fellow alcoholic. We saw that each sponsor would have to humbly admit his own needs as clearly as those of his prospect.”

“Until I was at my complete bottom, alcohol wasn’t even my problem. But thankfully, when I did hit bottom, AA was not hard to find.”

“It was at my home group that I learned to trust the experiences of the early groups with meetings. We have a Traditions meeting once a month and when I was new and heard the Traditions read out loud, the experiences of the early AA meetings gave me the first notion that real people -- drunks like me -- started this program.”

“If I am in pain, it may be beneficial to me if I am aware of those in even more pain ... The answer for my pain is in the Twelfth Step.”