279 Twelve & Twelve p-46/47
        The majority of A.A. members have suffered severely from self-justification
during their drinking days. For most of us, self-justification was the maker of excuses
for drinking & for all kinds of crazy & damaging conduct. We had made the
invention of alibis a fine art.
        We had to drink because times were hard or times were good. We had to drink
because at home we were smothered with love or got none at all. We had to drink
because at work we were great successes or dismal failures. We had to drink because
our nation had won a war or lost a peace. & so it went, as infinitum.
       
279 Twelve & Twelve p-47
        To see how our own erratic emotions victimized us often took a long time. Where
other people were concerned, we had to drop the word "blame" from our speech &
thought.
       
280 Alcoholics Anonymous p-100/101
        Assuming we are spiritually fit, we can do all sorts of things alcoholics are not
supposed to do. People have said we must not go where liquor is served; we must not
have it in our homes; we must shun friends who drink; we must avoid moving pictures
which show drinking scenes; we must not go into bars; our friends must hide their
bottles if we go to their houses; we must not think or be reminded about alcohol at all.
Our experience shows that this is not necessarily so.
        We meet these conditions every day. An alcoholic who cannot meet them still has
an alcoholic mind; there is something the matter with his spiritual status. His only
chance for sobriety would be some place like the Greenland icecap, & even there an
Eskimo might turn up with a bottle of Scotch & ruin everything!
       
281 Grapevine 1962
        There is only one sure test of all spiritual experiences; "By their fruits, ye shall
know them"
        This is why I think we should question no one's transformation - whether it be
sudden or gradual. Nor should we demand anyone's special type for ourselves, because
experience suggests that we are apt to receive whatever may be the most useful for our
own needs.
      
281 Twelve & Twelve p-48
        Human beings are never quite alike, so each of us, when making an inventory, will
need to determine what his individual character defects are. Having found the shoes that
fit, he ought to step into them & walk with new confidence that he is at last on the
right track.
       
282 Twelve & Twelve p-44
        Every time a person imposes his instincts unreasonably upon others, unhappiness
follows. If the pursuit of wealth tramples upon people who happen to be in the way,
then anger, jealousy, & revenge are likely to be aroused. If sex runs riot, there is a
similar uproar.
        Demands made upon other people for too much attention, protection, & love can
invite only domination or revulsion in the protectors themselves - two emotions quite as
unhealthy as the demands which evoked them. When an individual's desire for prestige
becomes uncontrollable, whether in the sewing circle or at the international conference
table, other people suffer & often revolt. This collision of instincts can produce
anything from a cold snub to a blazing revolution.
       
283 A.A. Comes Of Age p-52
        I had gone steadily downhill, & on that day in 1934 I lay upstairs in the hospital,
knowing for the first time that I was utterly hopeless.
        Lois was downstairs, & Dr. Silkwoth was trying in his gentle way to tell her
what was wrong with me & that I was hopeless. "But Bill has a tremendous amount of
will power," she said. "He has tried desperately to get well. We have tried everything.
Doctor, why can't he stop?"
        He explained that my drinking, once a habit, had become an obsession, a true
insanity that condemned me to drink against my will.
       
283 letter 1966
        In the late stages of our drinking, the will to resist has fled. Yet when we admit
complete defeat & when we become entirely ready to try A.A. principles, our
obsession leaves us & we enter a new dimension - freedom under God as we
understand Him.
       
284 letter 1954
        The Idea of "twenty four hour living" applies primarily to the emotional life of the
individual. Emotionally speaking, we must not live in yesterday, not in tomorrow.
        But I have never been able to see that this means the individual, the group, or A.A.
as a whole should give no thought whatever to how to function tomorrow or even in the
more distant future. Faith alone never constructed the house you live in. There had to be
a blueprint & a lot of work to bring it into reality.
        Nothing is truer for us of A.A. than the Biblical saying, "Faith without works is
dead". A.A.s services, all designed to make more & better Twelfth step work possible,
are the "works" that insure our life & growth by preventing anarchy or stagnation.
       
285 Grapevine 1961
        The alarming thing about pride blindness is the ease with which it is justified. But
we need not look far to see that self-justification is a universal destroyer of harmony
& of love. It sets man against man, nation against nation. By it, every form of folly
& violence can be made to look right, & even respectable.
       
285 A.A. Comes Of Age p-232
        It would be a product of false pride to claim that A.A. is a cure all even for
alcoholism.
      
286 Alcoholics Anonymous p-66/67
        We began to see that the world & its people had really dominated us. Under that
unhappy condition, the wrong doing of others, fancied or real, had power to actually
kill us, because we could be driven back to drink through resentment. We saw that
these resentments must be mastered but how? We could not wish them away.
        This was our course: We realized that the people who wronged us were perhaps
spiritually sick. So we asked God to help us show them the same tolerance, pity, &
patience that we would cheerfully grant a sick friend.
        Today, we avoid retaliation or argument. We cannot treat sick people that way. If
we do, we destroy our chance of being helpful. We cannot be helpful to all people, but
at least God will show us how to take a kindly & tolerant view of each & every one.
       
287 letter 1958
        Among A.A.s there is still a vast amount of mix up respecting what is material &
what is spiritual. I prefer to believe that it is all a matter of motive. If we use our
worldly possessions too selfishly, then we are materialists. But if we share these
possessions in helpfulness to others, the material aids the spiritual.
       
287 letter 1954
        The idea keeps persisting that the instincts are primarily bad & are the road
blocks before which all spirituality falters. I believe that the difference between good
& evil is not the difference between spiritual & instinctual man; it is the difference
between proper & improper use of the instinctual. Recognition & right channeling
of the instinctual are the essence of achieving wholeness.
       
288 Grapevine January 1958
        If we examine every disturbance we have, great or small, we will find at the root
of it some unhealthy demand. Let us, with God's help, continually surrender these
hobbling liabilities.
        Then we can be set free to live & love; we may then be able to twelfth step
ourselves, as well as others, into emotional sobriety.
       
289 Grapevine June 1961
        Sometimes I would be forced to look at situations where I was doing badly. Right
away, the search for excuses would become frantic.
        "These", I would exclaim, "are really a good man's faults". When that pet gadget
broke apart, I would think, "Well, if those people would only treat me right, I would not
behave the way I do". Next was this: "God well knows that I do have awful
compulsions. I just can not get over this one. So He will have to release me." At last
came the time when I would shout, "This I positively will not do! I will not even try."
        Of course, my conflicts went right on mounting, because I was simply loaded with
excuses, refusals, & outright rebellion.
       
289 Twelve & Twelve p-60
        In self-appraisal, what comes to us alone may be garbled by our own
rationalization & wishful thinking. The benefit of talking to another person is that we
can get his direct comment & counsel on our situation.
       
290 Twelve Concepts p-64/65
        Our attitude toward the giving of time when compared with our attitude toward
giving money presents an interesting contrast. We give a lot of our time to A.A.
activities for our own protection & growth, but also for the sake of our groups, our
areas, A.A. as a whole, &, above all, the newcomer. Translated into terms of money,
these collective sacrifices would add up to a huge sum.
        But when it comes to the actual spending of cash, particularly for A.A. service
overhead, many of us are apt to turn a bit reluctant. We think of the loss of all that
earning power in drinking years, of those sums we might have laid by for emergencies
or for education of the kids.
        In recent years, this attitude is everywhere on the decline; it quickly disappears
when the real need for a given A.A. service becomes clear. Donors can seldom see what
the exact result has been. They well know, however, that countless thousands of other
alcoholics & their families are being helped.
      
291 letter 1959
        I believe that when we were active alcoholics we drank mostly to kill pain of one
kind or another - physical or emotional or psychic. Of course, everybody has a cracking
point, & I suppose you reached yours - hence, the resort once more to the bottle.
        If I were you, I would not heap devastating blame on myself for this; on the other
hand, the experience should redouble your conviction that alcohol has no permanent
value as a painkiller.
       
291 Twelve & Twelve p-75
        In every A.A. story, pain has been the price of admission into a new life. But this
admission price purchased more than we expected. It led us to a measure of humility,
which we soon discovered to be a healer of pain. We began to fear pain less, & desire
humility more than ever.
       
292 Twelve & Twelve p-118/119
        When the distortion of family life through alcohol has been great, a long period of
patient striving may be necessary. After the husband joins A.A. the wife may become
discontented, even highly resentful that A.A. has done the very thing that all her years
of devotion had failed to do. Her husband may become so wrapped up in A.A. & his
new friends that he is inconsiderately away from home more than when he drank. Each
then blames the other.
        But eventually the alcoholic, now fully understanding how much he did to hurt his
wife & children, nearly always takes up his marriage responsibilities with a
willingness to repair what he can & accept what he can not. He persistently tries all of
A.A.s Twelve Steps in his home, often with fine results. He firmly but lovingly
commences to behave like a partner instead of like a bad boy.
       
293 Twelve & Twelve p-105
        All of us pass through times when we can pray only with the greatest exertion.
Occasionally we go even further than this. We are seized with a rebellion so sickening
that we simply will not pray. When these things happen, we should not think too ill of
ourselves. We should simply resume prayer as soon as we can, doing what we know to
be good for us.
       
293 Grapevine June 1958
        A man who persists in prayer finds himself in possession of great gifts. When he
has to deal with hard circumstances, he finds he can face them. He can accept himself
& the world around him.
        He can do this because he now accepts a God who is All - & who loves all.
When he says, "Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be Thy name" he deeply &
humbly means it. When in good meditation & thus freed from the clamors of the
world, he knows that he is in God's hands, that his own ultimate destiny is really secure,
here & hereafter, come what may.
       
294 letter 1958
        It seems to me that the primary object of any human being is to grow, as God
intended, that being the nature of all growing things.
        Our search must be for what reality we can find, which includes the best definition
& feeling of love that we can acquire. If the capability of loving is in the human
being, then it must surely be in his Creator.
        Theology helps me to believe that I live in a rational universe under a loving God,
& that my own irrationality can be chipped away, little by little. This is, I suppose, the
process of growth for which we are intended.
       
295 Twelve & Twelve p-32
        We thought we had been deeply serious about religious practices. However, upon
honest appraisal we found that we had been most superficial. Or sometimes, going to
extremes, we had wallowed in emotionalism & had also mistaken this for true
religious feeling. In both cases, we had been asking something for nothing.
        We had not prayed rightly. We had always said, "Grant me my wishes", instead of
"Thy will be done". The love of God & man we understood not at all. Therefore we
remained self deceived, & so incapable of receiving enough grace to restore us to
sanity.

296 Twelve & Twelve p-94
        Often, as we review each day, only the closest scrutiny will reveal what our true
motives were. There are cases where our ancient enemy rationalization has stepped in
& has justified conduct which was really wrong. The temptation here is to imagine
that we had good motives & reasons when we really had not.
        We "constructively criticized" someone who needed it, when our real motive was
to win a useless argument. Or, the person concerned not being present, we thought we
were helping others to understand him, when in actuality our true motive was to feel
superior by pulling him down.
        We hurt those we loved because they needed to be "taught a lesson", but we really
wanted to punish. We were depressed & complained we felt bad, when in fact we
were mainly asking for sympathy & attention.
       
297 letter 1949
        Though many of us have had to struggle for sobriety, never yet has this Fellowship
had to struggle for lost unity. Consequently, we sometimes take this one great gift for
granted. We forget that, should we lose our unity, the millions of alcoholics who still
"do not know" might never get their chance.
       
297 letter 1956
        We used to be skeptical about large A.A. gatherings like conventions, thinking
they might prove too exhibitionistic. But, on balance, their benefit is huge. While each
A.A.s interest should center principally in those about him & upon his own group, it is
both necessary & desirable that we all get a larger vision of the whole.
        The General Service Conference in New York also produces this effect upon those
who attend. It is a vision stretching process.
       
298 Twelve & Twelve p-109/110
        Even the newest of newcomers finds undreamed rewards as he tries to help his
brother alcoholic, the one who is even blinder than he. This is indeed the kind of giving
that actually demands nothing. He does not expect his brother sufferer to pay him, or
even to love him.
        & then he discovers that through the divine paradox of this kind of giving he has
found his own reward, whether or not his brother has yet received anything. His own
character may still be gravely defective, but he somehow knows that God has enabled
him to make a mighty beginning, & he senses that he stands at the edge of new
mysteries, joys, & experiences of which he had never before dreamed.
       
299 Twelve & Twelve p-185
        As the A.A. groups multiplied, so did anonymity problems. Enthusiastic over the
spectacular recovery of a brother alcoholic, we would sometimes discuss those intimate
& harrowing aspects of his case meant for his sponsor's ear alone. The aggrieved
victim would then rightly declare that his trust had been broken.
        When such stories got into circulation outside of A.A., the loss of confidence in
our anonymity promise was severe. It frequently turned people from us. Clearly, every
A.A. members' name & story, too - had to be confidential, if he wished.
       
299 A.A. Come Of Age p-293
        We now fully realize that one hundred per cent personal anonymity before the
public is just as vital to life of A.A. as one hundred percent sobriety is to the life of each
& every member. This is not the counsel of fear; it is the prudent voice of long
experience.
       
300 Alcoholics Anonymous p-49
        We who have traveled a path through agnosticism or atheism beg you to lay aside
prejudice, even against organized religion. We have learned that, whatever the human
frailties of various faiths may be, those faiths have given purpose & direction to
millions. People of faith have a rational idea of what life is all about.
        Actually, we used to have no reasonable conception whatever. We used to amuse
ourselves by cynically dissecting spiritual beliefs & practices, when we might have
seen that many spiritually minded persons of all races, colors, & creeds were
demonstrating a degree of stability, happiness, & usefulness that we should have
sought for ourselves.
      
301 Twelve & Twelve p-51/52
        In our behavior respecting financial & emotional security, fear, greed,
possessiveness, & pride have too often done their worse. Surveying his business or
employment record, almost any alcoholic can ask questions like these: In addition to
my drinking problem, what character defects contributed to my financial instability?
Did fear & inferiority about my fitness for my job destroy my confidence & fill me
with conflict? Or did I overvalue myself & play the big shot?
        Businesswomen in A.A. will find that these questions often apply to them too, &
the alcoholic housewife can also make the family financially insecure. Indeed, all
alcoholics need to cross-examine themselves ruthlessly to determine how their own
personality defects have demolished their security.
       
302 Alcoholics Anonymous p-17
        We A.A.s are like the passengers of great liner the moment after rescue from
shipwreck, when camaraderie, joyousness, & democracy pervade the vessel from
steerage to captains table.
        Unlike the feelings of the ships passengers, however, our joy in escape from
disaster does not subside as we go our individual ways. The feeling of sharing in a
common peril - relapse into alcoholism - continues to be an important element in the
powerful cement which binds us of A.A. together.
       
302 A.A. Comes Of Age p-18
        Our first woman alcoholic had been a patient of Dr. Harry Tiebout's, & he had
handed her a prepublication manuscript copy of the Big Book. The first reading made
her rebellious, but the second convinced her. Presently she came to a meeting in our
living room, & from there she returned to the sanitarium carrying this classic message
to a fellow patient: "WE are not alone any more".
       
303 Grapevine 1961
        Had I not been blessed with wise & loving advisers, I might have cracked up
long ago. A doctor once saved me from death by alcoholism because he obliged me to
face up to the deadliness of that malady. Another doctor, a psychiatrist, later on helped
me save my sanity because he led me to ferret out some of my deep lying defects. From
a clergyman I acquired the truthful principles by which we A.A.s now try to live.
        But these precious friends did far more than supply me with their professional
skills. I learned that I could go to them with any problem whatever. Their wisdom &
their integrity were mine for the asking.
        Many of my dearest A.A. friends have stood with me in exactly this same relation.
Oftentimes they could help where others could not, simply because they were A.A.s.
       
304 A.A. Comes Of Age p-232
        There are those who predict that A.A. may well become the new spearhead for a
spiritual awakening throughout the world. When our friends say these things, they are
both generous & sincere. But we of A.A. must reflect that such a tribute & such a
prophecy could well prove to be a heady drink for most of us - that is, if we really came
to believe this to be the real purpose of A.A., & if we commenced to behave
accordingly.
        Our Society, therefore, will prudently cleave to its single purpose: the carrying of
the message to the alcoholic who still suffers. Let us resist the proud assumption that
since God has enabled us to do well in one area we are destined to be a channel of
saving grace for everybody.
       
305 Twelve & Twelve p-21/22
        The principle that we shall find no enduring strength until we first admit complete
defeat is the main taproot from which our whole society has sprung & flowered.
       
305 Twelve & Twelve p-72/73
        Every newcomer is told, & soon realizes for himself, that his humble admission
of powerlessness over alcohol is his first step toward liberation from its paralyzing grip.
        So it is that we first see humility as a necessity. But this is the barest beginning. To
get completely away from our aversion to the idea of being humble, to gain a vision of
humility as the avenue to true freedom of the human spirit, to be willing to work for
humility as something to be desired for itself, takes most of us a long, long time. A
whole lifetime geared to self-centeredness cannot be set in reverse all at once.
       
306 letter 1950
        I do not think happiness or unhappiness is the point. How do we meet the
problems we face? How do we best learn from them & transmit what we have learned
to others, if they would receive the knowledge?
        In my view, we of this world are pupils in a great school of life. It is intended that
we try to grow, & that we try to help our fellow travelers to grow in the kind of love
that makes no demands. In short, we try to move toward the image & likeness of God
as we understand Him.
        When pain comes, we are expected to learn from it willingly, & help others to
learn. When happiness comes, we accept it as a gift, & thank God for it.
       
307 A.A. Comes Of Age p-139
        Above us, at the International Convention at ST. Louis in 1955, floated a banner
on which was inscribed the then new symbol for A.A., a circle enclosing a triangle. The
circle stands for the whole world of A.A., & the triangle stands for A.A.s three
legacies: Recovery, Unity, & Service.
        It is perhaps no accident that priests & seers of antiquity regarded this symbol as
a means of warding off spirits of evil.
       
307 A.A. Comes Of Age p-46-48
        When in 1955, we old-timers turned over our Three Legacies to the whole
movement, nostalgia for the old days blended with gratitude for the great day in which I
was now living. No more would it be necessary for me to act for, decide for, or protect
A.A..
        For a moment, I dreaded the coming change. But the mood quickly passed. The
conscience of A.A. as moved by the guidance of God could be depended upon to insure
A.A.s future. Clearly my job henceforth was to let go & let God.
       
308 letter 1960
        During acute depression, avoid trying to set your whole life in order all at once. If
you take on assignments so heavy that you are sure to fail in them at the moment, then
you are allowing yourself to be tricked by your unconscious. Thus you will continue to
make sure of your failure, & when it comes you will have another alibi for still more
retreat into depression.
        In short, the " all or nothing" attitude is a most destructive one. It is best to begin
with whatever the irreducible minimums of activity are. Then work for an enlargement
of these - day by day. Do not be disconcerted by setbacks - just start over.
       
309 Twelve & Twelve p-90
        It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause,
there is something wrong with us. If somebody hurts us & we are sore, we are in the
wrong too.
        But are there no exception to this rule? What about "justifiable" anger? If
somebody cheats us, aren't we entitled to be mad? & shouldn't we be properly angry
with self-righteous folks?
        For us of A.A. these adventures in anger are sometimes very dangerous. We have
found that even justified anger ought to be left to those better qualified to handle it.
 

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