31 letter 1942
        In God's economy, nothing is wasted. Through failure, we learn a lesson in
humility which is probably needed, painful though it is.
       
31 Grapevine November 1961
        We did not always come closer to wisdom by reason of our virtues; our better
understanding is often rooted in the pains of our former follies. Because this has been
the essence of our individual experience, it is also the essence of our experience as a
fellowship.
     
32 talk 1960
        Some strongly object to the A.A. position that alcoholism is an illness. This
concept, they feel, removes moral responsibility from alcoholics. As any A.A. knows,
this is far from true. We do not use the concept of sickness to absolve our members
from responsibility. On the contrary, we use the fact of fatal illness to clamp the
heaviest kind of moral obligation onto the sufferer, the obligation to use A.A.'s twelve
steps to get well.

        In the early days of his drinking, the alcoholic is often guilty of irresponsibility.
But once the time of compulsive drinking has arrive, he can not very well be held fully
accountable for his conduct. He then has an obsession that condemns him to drink, &
a bodily sensitivity to alcohol that guarantees his final madness & death.

        But when he is made aware of this condition, he is under pressure to accept A.A.'s
program of moral regeneration.
      
33 Twelve & Twelve p-104
        We discover that we receive guidance for our lives to just about the extent that we
stop making demands upon God to give it to us on order & on our terms.
       
33 Twelve & Twelve p-102
        In praying, we ask simply that throughout the day God place in us the best
understanding of His will that we can have for that day, & that we be given the grace
by which we may carry it out.
       
33 Twelve & Twelve p-98
        There is a direct linkage among self-examination meditation, & prayer. Taken
separately, these practices can bring much relief & benefit. But when they are
logically related & interwoven, the result is an unshakable foundation for life.
      
34 letter 1954
        While A.A. has restored thousands of poor Christians to their churches, & had
made believers out of atheists & agnostics, it has also made good A.A.'s out of those
belonging to the Buddhist, Islamic, & Jewish faiths. For example, we question very
much whether our Buddhist members in Japan would ever have joined this Society had
A.A. officially stamped itself a strictly Christian movement.

        You can easily convince yourself of this by imagining that A.A. started among the
Buddhists & that they then told you couldn't join them unless you became a Buddhist,
too. If you were a "Christian alcoholic under these circumstances, you might well turn
your face to the wall & die.
       
35 letter 1959
        A.A. is no success story in the ordinary sense of the word. It is a story of suffering
transmuted, under grace, into spiritual progress.
       
35 A.A. Comes of Age p-69
        For Dr. Bob, the insatiable craving for alcohol was evidently a physical
phenomenon which bedeviled several of his first years in A.A., a time when only days
& nights of carrying the message to other alcoholics could cause him to forger about
drinking. Although his craving was hard to withstand, it doubtless did account for some
part of the intense incentive that went into forming Akron's Group Number One.

        Bob's spiritual release did not come easily; it was to be painfully slow. It always
entailed the hardest kind of work & the sharpest vigilance.
       
36 Twelve & Twelve p-30
        We found many in A.A. who once thought, as we did, that humility was another
name for weakness. They helped us to get down to our right size. By their example they
showed us that humility & intellect could be compatible, provided we placed humility
first. When we began to do that, we received the gift of faith, a faith which works. This
faith is for you, too.
       
36 Twelve & Twelve p-74
        Where humility formerly stood for a forced feeding on humble pie, it now begins
to mean the nourishing ingredient that can five us serenity.
    
37 Grapevine March 1962
        One exercise that I practice is to try for a full inventory of my blessings & then
for a right acceptance of the many gifts that are mine - both temporal & spiritual. Here
I try to achieve a state of joyful gratitude. When such a brand of gratitude is repeatedly
affirmed & pondered, it can finally displace the natural tendency to congratulate
myself on whatever progress I may have been enabled to make in some areas of living.

        I try hard to hold fast to the truth that a full & thankful heart cannot entertain
great conceits. When brimming with gratitude, one's heartbeat must surely result in out
going love, the finest emotion that we can ever know.
     
38 letter 1950
        I am a firm believer in both guidance & prayer. But I an fully aware, & humble
enough, I hope, to see there may be nothing infallible about my guidance.

        The minute I figure I have got a perfectly clear pipeline to God, I have become
egotistical enough to get into real trouble. Nobody can cause more needless grief than a
power-driver who thinks he has got it straight from God.
     
39 Alcoholics Anonymous p-64/65
        Resentment is the number one offender. It destroys more alcoholics than anything
else. From it stem all forms of spiritual disease, for we have been not only mentally &
physically ill, we have also been spiritually ill. When our spiritual malady is overcome,
we straighten out mentally & physically.

        In dealing with our resentments, we set them on paper. We listed people,
institutions, or principles with whom we were angry. We asked ourselves why we were
angry. In most cases it was found that our self-esteem, our pocketbooks, our ambitions,
our personal relationships (including sex) were hurt or threatened.
       
39 letter 1949
        The most heated bit of letter writing can be a wonderful safety valve - providing
the wastebasket is somewhere nearby.
     
40 Twelve & Twelve p-71
        No member of A.A. wants to deprecate material achievement. Nor do we enter
into debate with the many who cling to the belief that to satisfy our basic natural desires
is the main object of life. But we are sure that no class of people in the world ever made
a worse mess of trying to live by this formula than alcoholic.

        We demanded more than our share of security, prestige, & romance. When we
seemed to be succeeding, we drank to dream still greater dreams. When we were
frustrated, even in part, we drank for oblivion.

        In all these strivings, so many of them well intentioned, our crippling handicap
was our lack of humility. We lacked the perspective to see that character building &
spiritual values had to come first, & that material satisfactions were simply by
products & not the chief aims of life
      
41 Grapevine August 1946
        Around 1943 or 1944, the central office asked the groups to list their membership
rules & send them in. After they arrived we set them all down. A little reflection upon
these many rules brought us to an astonishing conclusion.

        If all of these edicts had been in force everywhere at once it would have been
practically impossible for any alcoholic to have ever joined A.A. About nine-tenths of
our oldest & best members could never have got by!
      
41 Twelve & Twelve p-141
        At last experience taught us that to take away any alcoholic's full chance for
sobriety in A.A. was sometimes to pronounce his death sentence, & often to condemn
him to endless misery. Who dared to judge, jury, & executioner of his own sick
brother??
      
42 Twelve & Twelve p-22
        When first challenged to admit defeat, most of us revolted. We had approached
A.A. expecting to be taught self-confidence. "Then we had been told that so far as
alcohol was concerned, self confidence was no good whatever; in fact, it was a total
liability. There was no such thing as personal conquest of the alcoholic compulsion by
the unaided will.
     
42 Twelve & Twelve p-40
        It is when we try to make our will conform with God's that we begin to use it
rightly. To all of us, this was a most wonderful revelation. Our whole trouble had been
the misuse of will power. We had tried to bombard our problems with it instead of
attempting to bring it into agreement with God's intention for us. To make this
increasingly possible is the purpose of A.A.'s twelve steps.
       
43 Twelve & Twelve p-185/186
        As a rule, the average newcomer wanted his family to know immediately what he
was trying to do. He also wanted to tell others who had tried to help him - his doctor,
his minister, & close friends. As he gained confidence, he felt it right to explain his
new way of life to his employer & business associates. When opportunities to be
helpful came along, he found he could talk easily about A.A. to almost anyone.

        These quiet disclosures helped him to lose his fear of the alcoholic stigma, &
spread the news of A.A.'s existence in his community. Many a new man & woman
came to A.A. because of such conversations. Since it is only at the top public level that
anonymity is expected, such communications were well within its spirit.
      
44 letter 1966
        Too much of my life has been spent in dwelling upon the faults of others. This is a
most subtle & perverse form of self-satisfaction, which permits us to remain
comfortably unaware of our own defects. Too often we are heard to say, "if it weren't
for him (or her), how happy I'd be"
       
44 Grapevine march 1962
        Our very first problem is to accept our present circumstances as they are, ourselves
as we are, & the people about us as they are. This is to adopt a realistic humility
without which no genuine advance can even begin. Again & again, we shall need to
return to that unflattering point of departure. This is an exercise in acceptance that we
can profitably practice every day of our lives.

        Provided we strenuously avoid turning these realistic surveys of the facts of life
into unrealistic alibis for apathy or defeatism, they can be the sure foundation upon
which increased emotional health & therefore spiritual progress can be built.
      
45 Grapevine march 1958
        Today, the vast majority of us welcome any new light that can be thrown on the
alcoholic's mysterious & baffling malady. We welcome new & valuable knowledge
whether it issues from a test tube, from a psychiatrist's couch, or from revealing social
studies. We are glad of any kind of education that accurately informs the public &
changes its age-old attitude toward the drunk.

        More & more we regard all who labor in the total field of alcoholism as our
companions on a march from darkness into light. We see that we can accomplish
together what we could never accomplish in separation & in rivalry.
       
46 Twelve & Twelve p-123
        We have had a much keener look at ourselves & those about us. We have seen
that we were prodded by unreasonable fears or anxieties into making a life business of
winning fame, money, & what we thought was leadership. So false pride became the
reverse side of that ruinous coin marked "Fear". We simply had to be number one
people to cover up our deep lying inferiority's.
      
46 Twelve & Twelve p-124/125
        True ambition is not what we thought it was. True ambition is the profound desire
to live usefully & walk humbly under the grace of God.
      
47 Alcoholics Anonymous p-52/53/55
        The Wright brothers' almost childish faith that they could build a machine which
would fly was the mainspring of their accomplishment. Without that, nothing could
have happened.

        We agnostics & atheists were sticking to the idea that self sufficiency would
solve our problems. When others showed us that God sufficiency worked with them,
we began to feel like those who had insisted the Wrights would never fly. We were
seeing another kind of flight, a spiritual liberation from this world, people who rose
above their problems.
       
48 Twelve & Twelve p-88/89
        When a drunk has a terrific hangover because he drank heavily yesterday, he
cannot live well today. But there is another kind of hangover which we all experience
whether we are drinking or not. That is the emotional hangover, the direct result of
yesterday's & sometimes today's excesses of negative emotion - anger, fear, jealousy,
& the like.

        If we would live serenely today & tomorrow, we certainly need to eliminate
these hangovers. This doesn't mean we need to wander morbidly around in the past. It
requires an admission & correction of errors - now.
      
49 Alcoholics Anonymous p-33
        If we are planning to stop drinking, there must be no reservation of any kind, nor
any lurking notion that some day we will be immune to alcohol.
  
49 A.A. Comes of Age p-46
        Such is the paradox of A.A. regeneration: strength arising our of complete defeat
& weakness, the loss of one's old life as a condition for finding a new one.
  
50 A.A. Comes of Age p-224/225
        When we come into A.A. we find a greater personal freedom than any other
society knows. We cannot be compelled to do anything. In that sense our Society is a
benign anarchy. The word "anarchy" has a bad meaning to most of us. But I think that
the idealist who first advocated the concept felt that if only men were granted absolute
liberty, & were compelled to obey no one, they would then voluntarily associate
themselves in the common interest. A.A. is an association of the benign sort he
envisioned.

        But when we had to go into action - to function as groups - we discovered that we
also had to become a democracy. As our old-timers retired, we therefore began to elect
our trusted servants by majority vote. Each group in this sense became a town meeting.
All plans for group action had to be approved by the majority. This meant that no single
individual could appoint himself to act for his group or for A.A. as a whole. Neither
dictatorship nor paternalism was for us.
     
51 Grapevine January 1962
        In my own case, the foundation stone of freedom from fear is that of faith: a faith
that, despite all worldly appearances to the contrary, causes me to believe that I live in a
universe that makes sense.

        To me, this means a belief in a Creator who is all power, justice, & love; a God
who intends for me a purpose, a meaning, & a destiny to grow, however little an
haltingly, toward His own likeness & image. Before the coming of faith I had lived as
an alien in a cosmos that too often seemed both hostile & cruel. In it there could be no
inner security for me.
     
51 letter 1966
        When I was driven to my knees by alcohol, I was made ready to ask for the gift of
faith. & all was changed. Never again, my pains & problems notwithstanding,
would I experience my former desolation. I saw the universe to lighted by God's love; I
was alone no more.
       
52 Alcoholics Anonymous p-70
        Suppose we fall short of our chosen ideals & stumble? Does this mean we are
going to get drunk? Some people tell us so. But this is only a half-truth.

        It depends on us & on our motives. If we are sorry for what we have done, &
have the honest desire to let God take us to better things, we believe we ill be forgiven
& will have learned our lesson.

If we are not sorry, & our conduct continues to harm others, we are quite sure to
drink. These are facts out of our experience.
      
53 Twelve & Twelve p-120
        What can be said of many A.A. members who, for a variety of reasons, cannot
have a family life? At first many of these feel lonely, hurt, & left our as they witness
so much domestic happiness about them. If they cannot have this kind of happiness, can
A.A. offer them satisfactions of similar worth & durability?

        Yes - whenever they try hard to seek out these satisfactions. Surrounded by many
A.A. friends, the so-called loners tell us they no longer feel alone. In partnership with
others - women & men - they can devote themselves to any number of ideas, people,
& constructive projects. They can participate in enterprises which would be denied to
family men & women. We daily see such members render prodigies of service, &
receive great joys in return.
      
54 Twelve & Twelve p-80
        It is necessary that we extricate from an examination of our personal relations
every bit of information about ourselves & our fundamental difficulties that we can.
Since defective relation with other human beings have nearly always been the
immediate cause of our woes, including our alcoholism, no field of investigation could
yield more satisfying & valuable reward than this one.

        Calm, thoughtful reflection upon personal relations can deepen our insight. We
can go far beyond those things which were superficially wrong with us, to see those
flaws which were basic, flaws which sometimes were responsible for the whole pattern
of our lives. Thoroughness, we have found, will pay - & pay handsomely.
      
55 letter 1950
        Man is supposed to think, & act. He was not made in God's image to be an
automaton.
        My own formula along this line runs as follows: first, think through every situation
pro & con, praying meanwhile that I not be influenced by ego considerations. Affirm
that I would like to do God's will.

        Then, having turned the problem over in this fashion & getting no conclusive or
compelling answer, I wait for further guidance, which may come into the mind directly
or through other people or through circumstances.

        If I feel I can not wait, & still get no definite indication, I repeat the first measure
several times, try to pick out the best course, & then proceed to act. I know if I am
wrong, the heavens won't fall. A lesson will be learned, in any case.
       
56 Grapevine July 1965
        Sometimes, we register surprise, shock, & anger when people find fault with
A.A. We are apt to be disturbed to such an extent that we cannot benefit by constructive
criticism.

        This sort of resentment makes no friends & achieves no constructive purpose.
Certainly, this is an area in which we can improve.
      
56 Twelve Concepts p-69
        It is evident that the harmony, security, & future effectiveness of A.A. will
depend largely upon our maintenance of a thoroughly non-aggressive & pacific
attitude in all our public relations. This is an exacting assignment, because in our
drinking days we were prone to anger, hostility, rebellion, & aggression. &, even
though we are now sober, the old patterns of behavior are to a degree still with us,
always threatening to explode on any good excuse.

        But we now know this & therefore I feel confident that in the conduct of our
public affairs we shall always fine the grace to exert restraint.
     
57 Alcoholics Anonymous p-128/129
        As new comers, many of us have indulged in spiritual intoxication. Like a gaunt
prospector, belt drawn in over the last ounce of food, we saw our pick strike gold. Joy
at our release from a lifetime of frustration knew no bounds.

        The newcomer feels he has struck something better than gold, He may not see at
once that he has barely scratched a limitless lode which will pay dividends only if he
mines it for the rest of his life & insists on giving away the entire product.
      
58 letter 1954
        The positive value of righteous indignation is theoretical - especially for
alcoholics. It leaves ever one of us open to the rationalization that we may be as angry
as we like provided we can claim to be righteous about it.
     
58 Twelve & Twelve p-47
        When we harbored grudges & planned revenge for defeats, we were really
beating ourselves with the club of anger we had intended to use on others. We learned
that if we were seriously disturbed, our very first need was to quiet that disturbance,
regardless of who or what we thought caused it.
      
59 Twelve Concepts p-40/41
        One qualification for a useful life is give-& take, the ability to compromise
cheerfully. Compromise comes hard to us "all or nothing" drunks. Nevertheless, we
must never lose sight of the fact that progress is nearly always characterized by a series
of improving compromises.

        Of course, we cannot always compromise. There are circumstances in which it is
necessary to stick flat-footed to one's convictions until the issue is resolved. Deciding
when to compromise & when not to compromise always calls for the most careful
discrimination.
       
60 Twelve & Twelve p-29/30
        To the intellectually self-sufficient man or woman, many A.A.'s can say, " Yes, we
were like you - far too smart for our own good. We loved to have people call us
precocious. We used or education to blow ourselves up into prideful balloons, though
we were careful to hide this from others. Secretly, we felt we could float above the rest
of the folks on our brainpower alone.

        Scientific progress told us there was nothing man could not do. Knowledge was
all-powerful. Intellect could conquer nature, Since we were brighter than most folks (
so we thought), the spoils of victory would be ours for the thinking. The god of intellect
displaced the God of our fathers.

        But John Barleycorn had other ideas. We who had won so handsomely in a walk
turned into all-time losers. We saw that we had to reconsider or die.
       
61 Alcoholics Anonymous p-67/68
        Fear somehow touched about every aspect of our lives. It was an evil &
corroding thread; the fabric of our existence was shot through with it. It set in motion
trains of circumstances which brought us misfortune we felt we did not deserve. But did
not we often set the ball rolling ourselves?
       
61 Grapevine January 1962
        The problem of resolving fear has two aspects. We shall have to try for all the
freedom from fear that is possible for us to attain. Then we shall need to find both the
courage & the grace to deal constructively with whatever fears remain.
       
62 Twelve Concepts p-71/73
      When a drunk shows up among us & says that he does not like the A.A.
principles, people or service management, when he declares that he can do better
elsewhere - we are not worried. We simply say, "Maybe your case really is different.
Why don't you try something else?"

        If an A.A. member says he does not like his own group, we are not disturbed. We
simply say, "Why don't you try another one? Or start one of your own?"

        To those who wish to secede from A.A. altogether, we extend a cheerful invitation
to do just that. If they can do better by other means, we are glad. If after a trial they
cannot do better, we know they face a choice: they can go mad or die or they can return
to A.A. The decision is wholly theirs.( As a matter of fact, most of them do return to
A.A.)
    
63 Grapevine January 1958
        I asked myself, "Why can't the Twelve Steps work to release me from this
unbearable depression?" By the hour, I stared at the St. Francis Prayer: "It is better to
comfort than to be comforted."

        Suddenly I realized what the answer might be. My basic flaw had always been
dependence on people or circumstances to supply me with prestige, security &
confidence. Failing to get these things according to my perfectionist dreams &
specifications, I fought for them. & when defeat came, so did my depression.

        Reinforced by what grace I could find in prayer, I had to exert every ounce of will
& action to cut off these faulty emotional dependencies upon people & upon
circumstances. The only could I be free to love as Francis had loved.
       

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