Top 40 Alcoholics Anonymous Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I have found that the process of discovering who I really am begins with knowing who I really don’t want to be.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

2. “May I always remember that the power within me is far greater than any fear before me. May I always have patience, for I am on the right road.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

3. “It’s simple, not necessarily easy but, the rewards are endless.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

4. “But I’ve also learned I am not powerless over some things. I am not powerless over my attitudes. I am not powerless over negativity. I am not powerless over assuming responsibility for my own recovery.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

5. “The essence of all growth is a willingness to make a change for the better and then an unremitting willingness to shoulder whatever responsibility this entails.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

6. “The greatest enemies of us alcoholics are resentment, jealousy, envy, frustration, and fear.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

7. “God, I offer myself to Thee – to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will. Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help of Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!” We.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

8. “It is a spiritual axiom that every time we are disturbed, no matter what the cause, there is something wrong with us.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

9. “Four Horsemen–Terror, Bewilderment, Frustration, and Despair.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

10. “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. When the spiritual malady is overcome, we straighten out mentally and physically.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

11. “Being a little kinder, a little slower to anger, a little more loving makes my life better – day by day.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

12. “If we were to live, we had to be free of anger.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

13. “When we became alcoholics, crushed by a self-imposed crisis we could not postpone or evade, we had to fearlessly face the proposition that either God is everything or else He is nothing. God either is, or He isn’t. What was our choice to be?”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

14. “Happiness happens when results exceed expectations.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

15. “In my recovery, I learned that the pain of my defects is the very substance God uses to cleanse my character and to set me free.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

16. “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

17. “In all times of emotional disturbance or indecision, we can pause, ask for quiet, and in the stillness simply say: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference. Thy will, not mine, be done.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

18. “You hit bottom when you stop digging.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

19. “At long last, you have come to realize that service to others is all you have to offer in this life!”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

20. “Ninety days sober cleared my thinking enough to make me realize I’d hit bottom. If I were to go back to drinking, it would be just a matter of time before one of two things happened: I’d succeed at suicide, or I’d start the life of the living dead.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

21. “As we go through the day we pause, when agitated or doubtful, and ask for the right thought or action. We constantly remind ourselves we are no longer running the show, humbly saying to ourselves many times each day “Thy will be done.” We are then in much less danger of excitement, fear, anger, worry, self-pity, or foolish decisions. We become much more efficient. We do not tire so easily, for we are not burning up energy foolishly as we did when we were trying to arrange life to suit ourselves.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

22. “Definition of an alcoholic is an egomaniac with an inferiority complex.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

23. “I have no control over some of the things that happen in my life, but with the help of God I can now choose how I will respond. Today I choose to be happy, and when I’m not, I have the tools of this program to put me back on track.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

24. “If we still cling to something we will not let go, we ask God to help us be willing.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

25. “The feeling of having shared in a common peril is one element in the powerful cement which binds us. But that in itself would never have held us together as we are now joined. The tremendous fact for every one of us is that we have discovered a common solution. We have a way out on which we can absolutely agree, and upon which we can join in brotherly and harmonious action.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

26. “This is the how and why of it. First of all, we had to quit playing God. It didn’t work. Next, we decided that hereafter in this drama of life, God was going to be our Director. He is the Principal; we are His agents. He is the Father, and we are His children. Most good ideas are simple, and this concept was the keystone of the new and triumphant arch through which we passed to freedom.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

27. “So, for today, I have become an agnostic, who occasionally experiences violent swings toward faith.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

28. “We never apologize to anyone for depending upon our Creator. We can laugh at those who think spirituality the way of weakness. Paradoxically, it is the way of strength. The verdict of the ages is that faith means courage. All men of faith have courage. They trust their God. We never apologize for God. Instead we let Him demonstrate, through us, what He can do. We ask Him to remove our fear and direct our attention to what He would have us be. At once, we commence to outgrow fear.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

29. “To me sobriety is a gift from God to me. If I drank, it would be giving the gift back.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

30. “I have found that pain is a friend; it lets me know there is something wrong with my emotions, just as a physical pain lets me know there is something wrong with my body.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

31. “Avoid then, the deliberate manufacture of misery, but if trouble comes, cheerfully capitalize it as an opportunity to demonstrate His omnipotence.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

32. “I had been a real “people addict”; wherever I went there had to be someone who would pay some kind of attention to me.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

33. “In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material satisfactions were not the purpose of living.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

34. “We feel that elimination of our drinking is but a beginning. A much more important demonstration of our principles lies before us in our respective homes, occupations and affairs.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

35. “Just an unstable woman, undisciplined, poorly adjusted, and filled with nameless fears.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

36. “The first thing apparent was that this world and its people were often quite wrong. To conclude that others were wrong was as far as most of us ever got. The usual outcome was that people continued to wrong us and we stayed sore. Sometimes it was remorse and then we were sore at ourselves. But the more we fought and tried to have our own way, the worse matters got. As in war, the victor only seemed to win. Our moments of triumph were short-lived.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

37. “To get over drinking will require a transformation of thought and attitude.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

38. “A New Year: 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, 8,760 hours, 525,600 minutes – a.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

39. “Second, I discovered that I was able to love someone else responsibly, with respectful and genuine concern for that person’s growth. Before that time, I had thought that my ability to care sincerely about another’s well-being had atrophied from lack of use.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

40. “Life at home was falling apart around me. Every time I turned around I’d done something to make my mother cry.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

41. “For the first time in years I opened my box of paints and poured out an honest rage, an explosion of reds and blacks and yellows. As I looked at the drawing, tears of joy and relief flowed down my cheeks. In my disease, I had given up my art, a self-inflicted punishment far greater than any imposed from outside.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

42. “And, most importantly, I know who I am. I know my goals, dreams, values, and boundaries, and I know how to protect, nurture, and validate them. Those are the true rewards of sobriety, and they’re what I was looking for all along.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

43. “I was self conscious and ill at ease most of the time, my health was at the breaking point, and I was thoroughly miserable.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

44. “But she said if you had to control something, it was out of control.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

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

— Alcoholics Anonymous

46. “Most of us need some significance and importance in the eyes of others. We must have some meaning, be it only to one other person.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

47. “For the last four years I lived alone in a small house. The ceiling of one room had collapsed, and plaster dust was everywhere, coating the garbage and newspapers that littered the floor. Empty food cartons, beer cans, bottles, and dirty clothes lay where they were tossed. I had gotten a cat because the mice were out of control. But I was not conscientious about cleaning up after the cat. It is not surprising that I had few visitors and neighbors tended to avoid me.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous

48. “For it is by self-forgetting that one finds. It is by forgiving that one is forgiven. It is by dying that one awakens to Eternal Life.”

— Alcoholics Anonymous