And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. ... I can find no serenity until I accept that person place thing or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

And acceptance is the answer to all my problems today. When I am disturbed, it is because I find some person, place, thing, or situation "some fact of my life" unacceptable to me, and I can find no serenity until I accept that person, place, thing, or situation as being exactly the way it is supposed to be at this moment.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

Deep down in every man woman and child is the fundamental idea of God. It may be obscured by calamity by pomp by worship of other things but in some form or other it is there. For faith in a Power greater than ourselves and miraculous demonstrations of that power in human lives are facts as old as man himself.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

I had sent her to four consecutive psychiatrists, and not one of them had gotten me sober.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

No one waits to trap him in a lie. He is told what lies he is getting ready to tell.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

Not being a man of means, I knew that if I did not stay sober enough to earn money, I would run out of liquor.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

Our human resources as marshalled by the will were not sufficient they failed utterly.... Every day is a day when we must carry the vision of God's will into all our activities.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

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 and physically ill we have been spiritually sick.

— Alcoholics Anonymous

Selfishness, self-centeredness! That, we think, is the root of our troubles. Driven by a hundred forms of fear, self-delusion, self-seeking, and self-pity, we step on the toes of our fellows and they retaliate. Sometimes they hurt us, seemingly without provocation, but we invariably find that at some time in the past we have made decisions based on self which later placed us in a position to be hurt. So our troubles, we think, are basically of our own making.

— Alcoholics Anonymous