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“I need to remember how humiliated, confused, insecure and frightened I felt at my first meeting, and compare that to how I feel today.”

“Ever so slowly, I could feel myself changing. Things that had seemed important were no longer important. There was inside me a warming, a softening, a stirring, as the petals of a rosebud stir almost imperceptibly into a blossom.”

“I am learning how to cope with life, people, and situations, not as I want them to be, but as they really are.”

“The way our ‘worthy’ alcoholics have sometimes tried to judge the ‘less worthy’ is, as we look back on it, rather comical. Imagine, if you can, one alcoholic judging another!”

“The next time you feel hurt, outraged, bitter or resentful – the beginning of many a slip as attested to by AA speakers – try to remember quickly that you haven’t been mortally harmed. In nearly all cases, it’s just a pain in your feelings!”

“Am I strong enough? Am I willing to commit my life and my heart at an even deeper level to doing whatever it takes to keep moving forward?”

“We have to keep looking for something better than dullness, better than average living, better than mediocre spirituality.”

“As I peel away the layers of day-to-day expediency, I realize that my zigzag, erratic, and inconsistent course was in the general direction of progress all the time.”

“The ability to laugh at ourselves is an intrinsic part of the healing process.”

“When we reach a maximum in understanding, we know how very much we shall never understand.”

‘Imperfection offers me the freedom of a million potentials.”

“Sound policy can only be made by rubbing the conservatives and the promoters together. Their discussions, if free from personal ambitions and resentment, can be depended upon to produce the right answers. For us, there is no other way.”

“I am still amazed at the aura around AA meetings ... No matter what our immediate problems, fears, or resentments, we come to a halt when the meeting begins and focus on our primary purpose.”

“Older AAs who know the record are unanimous in their feeling that an intelligence greater than ours has surely been at work, else we could never have avoided so many pitfalls, could never have been so happily related to our millions of friends in the outside world.”

“Our mistakes of yesterday can be stepping stones for tomorrow if we do something about them today.”