“During his first AA years every AA has had plenty of the urge to revolt against authority. I know I did, and can’t claim to be over it yet. I’ve also served my time as a maker of rules, a regulator of other people’s conduct ... I can now look back upon such experiences with much amusement. And gratitude as well.”

“Spiritual growth and experiences are not limited to orthodox believers in a deity, any more than the disease of alcoholism is limited to skid-row bums.”

“I have discovered a new way to learn – by shutting my mouth and listening ... It’s not so much what I’m doing as what I’m not doing. I’m not talking. So I’m open; I’m teachable.”

“I was so busy juggling the regrets of the past with the expectations of tomorrow I had no time for living in the present.”

“Personal glorification, overweening pride, consuming ambition, exhibitionism, intolerant smugness, money or power madness, refusal to admit mistakes and learn from them, self-satisfaction, lazy complacency – these and many more are the garden variety of ills which so often beset movements as well as individuals.”

“It is out of our discussions, our differences of opinion, our daily experiences, and our general consent that the true answers must finally come.”

“Only a gift given in love and gratitude is blessed to the giver and precious to the receiver.”

“In the life of each AA member, there still lurks a tyrant. His name is alcohol.”

"What I've had to figure out is that I can't figure anything out."

"My life and the lives of those around me do, in fact, form their own parts in a symphony of interaction."

"The phrase 'God as we understand him' is perhaps the most important expression to be found in our whole AA vocabulary. Within the compass of these five significant words there can be included every kind and degree of faith, together with the positive assurance that each of us may choose his own."

"I've likened that transforming instant, when despair gave way to a glimmer of hope, to a tiny flower sprung into bloom amid the bombed-out wreckage of my life. Thanks to AA, that tiny bloom was to become a garden."

"Sobriety does interesting things to the mind – clears it up some, lets a bit of honesty and truth filter in, and begins to demand reality."

"Sometimes taking somebody else's inventory can be most beneficial. When I was doing my Fourth Step, an old-timer suggested I list the names of those against whom I held resentments, followed by two or three sentences describing what they had done to earn my displeasure. Then, after putting the list aside for a day, I was to cross off each person's name and replace it with my own."

"So long as there is the slightest interest in sobriety, the most unmoral, the most antisocial, the most critical alcoholic may gather about him a few kindred spirits and announce to us that a new Alcoholics Anonymous group has been formed. Anti-God, anti-medicine, anti-our recovery program, even anti-each other – these rampant individuals are still an AA group if they think so!"