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“I accepted the invitation to go on a Twelfth Step call and I in turn was twelfth-stepped.”

“It has to be love, not government that keeps AA stuck together.”

“I am grateful for this minute. My eternity may be in it.”

“Our spiritual way of life is safe for future generations if, as a Society, we resist the temptation to receive money from the outside world. But this leaves us with a responsibility – one that every member ought to understand. We cannot skimp when the treasurer of our group passes the hat. Our groups, our areas, and AA as a whole will not function unless our services are sufficient and their bills are paid.”

“I have never mastered the art of self-sponsorship, and I doubt that I ever will.”

“The whole world became mine when I had nowhere else to go.”

“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.”

“One of the truly great gifts in this Fellowship of mutually concerned people is the gift of the art of listening.”

“There are no shibboleths in AA. We are not bound by theological doctrine ... We are many minds in our organization.”

“After endless voting on a title for the new work we had decided to call it The Way Out. But inquiry by Fritz M., our Maryland alcoholic, at The Library of Congress disclosed the fact that 12 books already bore that title. Surely we couldn't make our book the 13th. So we named it Alcoholics Anonymous instead! Though we didn't know it, our movement then got its name -- a name which because of the implication of humility and modesty has given us our treasured spiritual principle of anonymity.”

“Our AA Traditions are, we trust, securely anchored in those wise precepts: charity, gratitude, and humility. Nor have we forgotten prudence. May these virtues ever stand clear before us in our meditations.”

“Admitting I lack faith does me no harm ... being different, dissenting from views by a majority of my peers, is not a source of guilt.”

“Dr. Silkworth taught us how to till the black soil of hopelessness, out of which every single spiritual awakening in our fellowship has since flowered. In December 1934 this man of science had sat humbly by my bed following my own sudden and overwhelming spiritual experience, reassuring me: ‘No, Bill,’ he had said, ‘you are not hallucinating. Whatever you have got, you had better hang on to; it is so much better than what you had only an hour ago.’”

“One may say that anonymity is the spiritual base, the sure key to all the rest of our Traditions. It has come to stand for prudence and, most importantly, for self-effacement.”

“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.’”