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“If I want to be of some use to someone (my family, my employer, my community) then I can be a leader by becoming a servant. This is one of those crazy paradoxes we find all over the AA program: being a servant to be a leader.”

“I started to understand that while I didn’t believe in churches, I had to see that something or someone was working in my life that hadn’t been there before.”

“Ever deepening humility, accompanied by an ever greater willingness to accept and to act upon clear obligations -- these are truly our touchstones for all growth in the life of the spirit.”

“Alcoholics have short memories.”

“Pain is one of our greatest teachers. Though I still find it difficult to accept today’s pain and anxiety with any degree of serenity -- as those more advanced in the spiritual life seem able to do -- I can, if I try hard, give thanks for present pain nevertheless.”

“Surrender has nothing to do with giving up. It means to stop fighting.”

“New people are the lifeblood of AA. I am eternally grateful to them. By extension I am, therefore, grateful to Tradition Three for making it possible for all who want what we have to come to AA.”

“If you haven’t been to a meeting for a while, come, and add to the mix ... we need you. Come for yourself, come for the Fellowship, come to celebrate sobriety, and come for the alcoholic who still suffers.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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!’”

“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.”