“I’m working diligently to improve my character. I work daily on trying to reign in my impetuous temper, my obsession with reaction rather than reflection, and that silly ego that keeps rearing its ugly head.

“I’m grateful for AA’s reference to progress rather than perfection. Despite my shortcomings, with the help of the AA program and my brothers in AA, improvements will continue to be made.”

“One day it will be left to the young people now in our Fellowship to carry on the original spirit and traditions of AA, even though the buzz words and trends will come and go. It will be up to us to teach newcomers how to maintain the type of sobriety that achieves the promises of the Big Book and dispels some of the fables of recovery popular today. It will be up to us to help the newcomer from the street dry out, shakes and pukes and all. We will be left to teach the little things: how to sit at the front, not the back of the room, say hello to the new guy, wash coffee cups and ashtrays. One day it will be up to us to uphold the Traditions. It will be up to us to keep it simple.”

“Alcoholics Anonymous has an answer to problems in sobriety, making sobriety, eventually, something wonderful instead of something that can drive people to drink.”

“I am still arrogant, egocentric, self-righteous, with no humility, even phony at times, but I'm trying to be a better person and help my fellowman. Guess I'll never be a saint, but whatever I am, I want to be sober and in AA.”

“Step Six may be the greatest act of courage in the whole twelve-step process: a total act of faith. I have to trust that God will see the big picture and make the right choices.”

“Sobriety isn’t a discrete list of tasks that you do and then check off; it’s a state of being that pervades every aspect of your life.”

“For me, there is no better feeling than the one I get running into another alcoholic when I’m feeling down. We alcoholics are bonded together by the sadness of a deadly disease and the miracle of a spiritual solution.”

“Many blessings have been showered upon me during my five years and nine months of sobriety -- great spiritual gifts, as well as the more ordinary supplies of money and goods. These great gifts come one after the other in spite of my own foolishness and fumbling, as I very slowly grope my way toward the light of reason and love.”

“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.”