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“Although we can borrow from religion, medicine, and psychiatry, we are not any one of them. We cannot run hospitals nor half-way houses, nor marry the group with a religious sect. We cannot send lobbyists to Congress and we don't mix AA with banking enterprises. We aren't educators nor counselors. We cannot lend our name to any other cause except our own. The more we mind our own business, the greater our influence becomes; medicine, religion, and psychiatry start borrowing from our experience and ideas. So do the fields of education, research, and rehabilitation. All kinds of groups based on AA's Twelve Steps have evolved, groups that deal with gambling, eating, drug addiction, mental illness, divorce, etc. They've borrowed from the AA program and made their own adaptations. We didn't have to endorse them or lend our name. This tells us strongly that the more AA sticks to its primary purpose, the greater will be its helpful influence.”

“The temporary security of material things is a hollow shelter if built at the expense of spiritual growth.”

“Tradition Six enjoins the group never to go into business nor ever to lend the AA name or money credit to any ‘outside’ enterprise, no matter how good ... We would thus divide the spiritual from the material, confine the AA movement to its sole aim and insure (however wealthy as individuals we may become) that AA itself shall always remain poor. We dare not risk the distractions of corporate wealth.”

“Even though some of the ghosts of the past may still be spooking around, popping up from time to time to scare me, today I can pretty much handle them. Today the only real monster I have to face is myself, that part of me that tries to urge me back to drinking.”

“I know that my errors of yesterday still have their effect; that my shortcomings of today may likewise affect our future. So it is, with each and all of us.”

“Tolerance is the art of seeing yourself as others see you -- and not getting mad about it.”

“I have no secrets, and I fear no man. I am not anxious about death. I am alive, forever, within this 24 hours.”

“I no longer feel isolated, alone or without purpose. I feel like life is going somewhere, and I don’t feel like I have to know where.”

“Today, there are hundreds of [AA] centers shedding their warm illumination upon the lives of thousands, lighting the dark shoals where the stranded and hopeless lie breaking up -- those fingers of light already stretching to our beachheads in other lands.

“Now comes another lighted lamp -- this little newspaper called the Grapevine. May its rays of hope and experience ever fall upon the current of our AA life and one day illumine every dark corner of this alcoholic world.”