ADDICTIONS

• I need to know that it is OK to make a mistake and that I am not a mistake.
• Sitting in Fellowship meetings doesn't make you a member any more than sitting in a chicken coop makes you a chicken.
• You can't have everything — where would you put it?
• I keep going to meetings, because I can't store awareness.
• Nothing is so bad that a drink won't make worse.
• The subconscious ... works to create the reality according to the programming it has been fed.
  Susan Smith James
• My problem wasn't my drinking; it was my thinking.
• I will begin to turn away from a pattern of thought that produces personal pain.
• The voices in my head often shout to me as I'm about to start sharing at a meeting, "Dramatise it! Dramatise it!"
• Show an alcoholic a rut and he'll move in and furnish it.
• When one begins to flee the realities of living, each step is with increasing speed and with each step vision narrows.

BLESSINGS

• Have a nice day, unless you have other plans.
• Lang may yir lums reek.
• May you find a kind of peace ... and the time to live within it.
• May we have the hindsight to know where we've been, the foresight to know where we are going, and the insight to know when we have gone far enough.
• Make yourself a blessing to someone —
  Your smile or your touch,
  Can be the grace that saves.
• May you ever hold hands with faith and may the Great Spirit always be your eternal beacon.
• It's a pity we can't forget our troubles the way we forget our blessings.

COURAGE

• Sobriety is not for the faint of heart.
• There is but one ultimate Power. This Power is to each one what he is to it.
  Ernest Holmes
• Don't quit before your miracle happens to you.
• Someone who knew what he was talking about once remarked that pain is the touchstone of all spiritual progress.
  Bill W.
• If you wait until you're not scared, you'll never do anything. This programme taught me to work with fear.
• The task ahead of us is never as great as the Power behind us.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• If you don't ask, you don't get.
  Mahatma Gandhi
• A man who has the courage of his platitudes is always a successful man.
  Van Wyck Brooks
• Give as much of yourself as you can, to as much of Your Higher Power as you can understand.
• Often the test of courage is not to die,
  But to live.
  Orestes
• It is not because things are difficult that we do not dare, it is because we do not dare that they are difficult.
  Seneca

DEATH

• Always go to other people's funerals, otherwise they won't come to yours.
  Yogi Berra
• Grief is a jagged, uphill climb. Easy does it. Pain takes a lot of energy.
• In elementary school, in case of fire you have to line up quietly in a single file line from smallest to tallest. What is the logic? Do tall people burn slower?
  Warren Hutcherson
• We must learn from the mistakes of others because we won't live long enough to make them all ourselves.
• One can survive anything these days except death.
  Oscar Wilde

EMOTIONS

• Rule #1: Don't sweat the small stuff.
  Rule #2: It's all small stuff.
  Dr. Michael Mantell
• No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear.
  Edmund Burke
• I worry only as long as I don't want to be happy.
• Fear is the darkroom where negatives are developed.
• To cure jealousy is to see it for what it is, a dissatisfaction with self.
  Joan Dideon
• FEAR means false expectation, assumed real.
• FINE means feeling incapable of normal expression.
• HALT means don't get too hungry. angry, lonely, or tired.
• NUTS means not using the steps.
• FINE means frantic, insecure, neurotic, and emotional.

FAITH

• God's Will
  Will not take you to a place
  Where His grace cannot sustain you.
• Once you accept the conscience of God — however you define Him, however you explain your relationship to Him — then you are caught forever with His presence in the centre of all things.
  Morris West
• To believe in something not yet proved and to underwrite it with our lives; it is the only way we can leave the future open.
• The feeling remains that God is on the journey too.
  Teresa of Avila
• People say they'll believe it when they see it...
  But they'll see it when they believe it...
• But I know God didn't bring me this far to drop me on my ass now.
• All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all I have not seen.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Faith is spelled a-c-t-i-o-n.
• We are responsible for the effort not the outcome.
  Barbara Czestochowa
• Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.
  Madeleine L'Engle
• God is no enemy to you. He asks no more that that He hear you call Him "Friend."
  A Course In Miracles

GRATITUDE

• Gratitude is not only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all the others.
  Marcus Tullius Cicero
• I've been living on borrowed time since I got here, and everything I have today and everything I am is the direct result of the grace of God.
• Thank you for the hell we went through to get to the peace we can now feel.
• Don't catch me, I'm falling — ever deeper into the Grace of God.
• I'm not what I want to be,
  I'm not what I can be,
  But, thank God, I'm not what I used to be.
• Practice an attitude of gratitude.
• Let us be grateful for our many blessings, both large and small.

HUMILITY

• You grow up the day you have your first real laugh at yourself.
  Ethel Barrymore
• We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.
  Talmudic saying
• Step 1 – I can't,
  Step 2 – He can,
  Step 3 – I should let Him.
• Humility may, if one is fortunate, occur when the I is not in operation. One can see humility operating in others. They are not aware of it. The moment One says "I've got humility," it is gone.
• Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.
• More and more, I know less and less, about more and more.
• The one important thing I have learned over the years is the difference between taking one's work seriously and taking one's self seriously. The first is imperative and the second is disastrous.
  Dame Margot Fonteyn
• I wanted to be famous and God made me anonymous.
• Rule of St. Benedict and other authors says that eventually we "welcome joyfully the truth that God is God and we are not."
• It is a sign of strength, not of weakness, to admit that you don't know all the answers.
  John P. Loughrane
• You can not fight against the future.
  W. E. Gladstone
• Humility is evasive: Just when you think you have it, you don't.
  Thomas Jefferson
• No matter where you've been or what you have done, somebody has "been there" or "done that" before you.
• Humility is a strange thing, the minute you think you've got it, you've lost it.
  E. D. Hulse
• Let each look to himself and see what God wants of him and attend to this, leaving all else alone.
  Henry Suso

INTIMACY

• As one descends lower and lower into hell, the need to love burns more intensely.
  Sartre, "Saint Genet"
• I have an obligation to truly "listen" to others, and to really "hear" what lies behind their words, to the best of my ability.
• The best times of one's life are those times that we share.
• I am only as sick as my secrets.
• Love expressed is love experienced.
• Don't walk in front of me, I may not follow;
  Don't walk behind me, I may not lead;
  Walk beside me, and just be my friend.
  Camus

JUDGEMENT

• It is well, when one is judging a friend, to remember that he is judging you with the same godlike and superior impartiality.
  Arnold Bennett
• Show me what a man envies the least in others and I will show you what he has got the most of himself.
  Josh Billings
• Never underestimate the power of an intelligent blonde. We can't be stopped with conventional weapons.
• The tragedy of disliking a fellow is that we want everyone else to dislike him too.
  Frank A. Clark
• Hate is a prolonged form of suicide.
  Douglas V. Steere
• I used to drink to make other people more interesting.
• Our contempt says we matter if we can look down on another person or life itself.
  Ellen Ross
• If a parsley farmer is sued, can they garnish his wages?
• Nothing is more revolting than the majority; ...
  Goethe
• Time wasted on getting even can never be used on getting ahead.
• Very few addictive types blame themselves until they have exhausted all other possibilities.
• When I compare myself with others, I am comparing how I feel, inside, with how they look, outside.
• Don't compare, identify.

KNOW YOURSELF

• Knowing others is intelligence;
  Knowing yourself is true wisdom.
  Mastering others is strength;
  Mastering yourself is true power.
  Tao Te Ching
• Those who know do not say;
  those who say do not know.
  Lao-tzu
• Man must cease attributing his problems to his environment, and learn again to exercise his will — his personal responsibility in the realm of faith and morals.
  Albert Schweitzer
• I'm unique, just like everybody else
• We must perform self analysis and change our behaviour and character. We must not pretend to be something which we are not, which results in friction. We must not deceive our fellow man.
  The Hopi Way
• I am a perfect example that no one is perfect
• The spirituality of imperfection is a spirituality of "not having all the answers."
  Spirituality of Imperfection
• Men wish to be saved from the mischief of their vices, but not from their vices.
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
  
  
• If nothing changes, nothing changes. Insanity is trying to get different results from the same actions.
• EGO means edging God out.
• We have the opportunity to choose who the parents of our children will be.
• If your parents never had children, chances are you won't either.
  Dick Cavett
• I was a vegetarian until I started leaning towards sunlight.
  Rita Rudner
• Dignity: A mysterious carriage of the body to conceal the defects of the mind.
• Take what you can use and leave the rest.
• Who listens to Reason is lost: Reason enslaves all whose minds are not strong enough to master her.
  George Bernard Shaw
• I tried to think my way out of lots of problems. It never worked once.
• Don't intellectualise, utilise.
• Peace begins with me.
• The only real freedom a human being can ever know is doing what you ought to do because you want to do it.
• Anyone without a sense of humour is at the mercy of the rest of us.
• We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
  Goethe
• Any Idea worth having, is worth closer examination.
• About all I ever learned from history is that I'm not very good at learning from history.
• What is perceived is already lost.
• Willingness to see ourselves as we really are, not the exercise of the intellect, is the key.
• Self-examination is a highway from which we never truly exit.
• Today I have gifts in my life, money, power or prestige can't buy, force, or borrow. I fit in my skin.
• The unexamined life is not worth living
  Socrates

LIFE

• I am not a human being having a spiritual experience,
  I am a spiritual being having a human experience.
• Life isn't a destination; it's a journey. We all come upon unexpected curves and turning points, mountaintops and valleys. Everything that happens to us shapes who we are becoming. And in the adventure of each day, we discover the best in ourselves.
• We shall never rest, until we become that which we have always been.
  Meister Eckhart
• What you are is God's gift to you; what you make of it is your gift to God.
  Anthony Dalla Villa
• We do not go into the desert to escape people but to learn how to find them; we do not leave them in order to have nothing more to do with them, but to find out the way to do them the most good.
  Thomas Merton
• We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.
  Sir Winston Churchill
• Love it the way it is.
  Thaddeus Golas
• The luxury of doing good surpasses every other personal enjoyment.
  John Gay
• Live in the solution not the problem
• I knew how to die but I did not know how to live.

MIRACLES

• I am a living miracle, one day at a time.
• ... That which is inside him will flower, as under the activity of the AA programme.
  Dr Harry M. Tiebout, Alcoholics Anonymous (3rd edition)
• The real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin air but to walk on earth.
  Thich Nhat Hanh
• Ain't it wonderful to have a fatal disease, and know that all you need to do is follow the steps and suggestions, and you'll die from something else.
• For those who experience them regularly, miracles are very ordinary
  George Bernard Shaw, "Saint Joan"

NOW!NESS

• Carpe diem!
• We are here and it is now. Further than that all human knowledge is moonshine.
  H. L. Mencken
• Warm bodies I sense,
  Are not machines that can only make money.
  Live!!!
• Today well lived, makes every yesterday a dream of happiness, every tomorrow a vision of hope. Look well, therefore, to this day.
  Sanskrit proverb
• Yesterday is gone; forget it.
  Tomorrow never comes; don't worry.
  Today is here; get busy.
• I have come to believe in the "Sacrament of the Moment," which presupposes trust in the ultimate goodness of my creator.
  R. Casey
• Spirituality is like riding a bike, as soon as you stop moving forward, you fall down.
  Grapevine Calendar, December 1996
• Planning is only the ego's decision to be anxious now.
  Hugh Prather

OTHER PEOPLE

• He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.
  Confucius
• If it's tourist season, why can't we shoot them?
• God must hide in people; it's the last place anyone would think to look.
• If you do not find God in the next person you meet, you might as well stop trying.
  Mahatma Gandhi
• I just got skylights put in my place. The people who live above me are furious.
• Everybody is my teacher. Some teach me what to do; some teach me what not to do.
• Do cemetery workers prefer the graveyard shift?
• If you are hating somebody, you might as well call them up in the middle of the night because they are sleeping like a log while you are the one losing sleep.
• Is it true that cannibals don't eat clowns because they taste funny?
• When they are ready, you can do no wrong. If they are not ready, you can do no right.
• When you look at Prince Charles, don't you think that someone in the Royal family knew someone in the Royal family?
  Robin Williams
• Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do "practice"?
• When sign makers go on strike, is anything written on their signs?
• Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be.
  Thomas a Kempis
• Should vegetarians eat animal crackers?

PRAYER

• On this date [30 June] in 1941, Ruth Hock, Secretary, Office Manager, and only employee of the AA Foundation, saw a little prayer in the New York Times. She copied it twenty times on a stencil and mimeographed a bunch of copies, cutting them in strips. From that date on, she included a copy of the Serenity Prayer with each response to inquiries about Alcoholics Anonymous.
• Sometimes the voice we hear...
  needs to be...
  our own.
• Scream at God if that's the only thing that will get results.
  Brendan Francis
• GOD means getting good orderly direction.
• Our immediate temptation will be to ask for specific solutions to specific problems, and for the ability to help other people as we have already thought they should be helped. In that case, we are asking God to do it our way.
  Bill W.
• Be very careful what you ask God for; He may just give it to you.
• Trying to pray is praying.
• When you pray for anyone you tend to modify your personal attitude toward him.
  Norman Vincent Peale
• For all that's been, thank you, for all that's to be, yes.
• God does not make terms too difficult to those who seek Him.
• A little lifting of the heart suffices; a little remembrance of God, one act of inward worship are prayers which, however short, are nevertheless acceptable to God.
  Brother Lawrence
• Loving, like prayer, is a power as well as a process. It's curative. It is creative.
• Backsliding begins when knee bending stops.

QUESTIONS

• If a mute swears, does his mother wash his hands with soap?
• If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, is it considered a hostage situation?
• So what's the speed of dark?
• If olive oil comes from olives, where does baby oil come from?
• Why do they sterilise needles for lethal injections?
• Why doesn't glue stick to the inside of the bottle?
• If a book about failures doesn't sell, is it a success?
• What do people mean when they say the computer went down on me?
  Marilyn Pittman
• If the funeral procession is at night, do folks drive with their lights off?
• If the cops arrest a mime, do they tell him he has the right to remain silent?
• If you're cross-eyed and have dyslexia, can you read all right?
• If a stealth bomber crashes in a forest, will it make a sound?
• Instead of talking to your plants, if you yelled at them would they still grow? Only to be troubled and insecure?

RELATIONSHIP

• Let God love you through others and let God love others through you.
  D. M. Street
• No one ever committed suicide in the midst of helping someone else.
• Compassion is the basis of all morality.
  Arthur Schopenhauer
• Love "bears all things" and "endures all things." These words say all there is to be said; nothing can be added to them. For we are in the deepest sense the victims and the instruments of cosmogonic "love."
  Carl Jung
• What is a date, really, but a job interview that lasts all night? The only difference between a date and a job interview is that in not many job interviews is there a chance you'll end up naked at the end of it.
• Relationships are hard. It's like a full-time job, and we should treat it like one. If your boyfriend or girlfriend wants to leave you, they should give you two weeks' notice. There should be severance pay, and before they leave you, they should have to find you a temp.
  Bob Ettinger
• Of love, of help, of understanding, and of sympathy, give and keep giving.
• Love is an act of endless forgiveness, a tender look which becomes a habit.
  Peter Ustinov

SERENITY

• Rule #62 — Don't take yourself too damn seriously.
  Twelve Steps And Twelve Traditions
• As the pain subsides, a healing tranquility takes its place. And when humility and serenity are combined, something else of great moment is apt to occur.
  Twelve Steps And Twelve Traditions
• I never got drunk watching another drink. I never got serenity watching others do the steps. This is a programme of action.
• Thinking about interior peace destroys interior peace. The patient who constantly feels his pulse is not getting any better.
  Hubert van Zeller

TIME

• I went for a walk last night and my kids asked me how long I'd be gone.
  I said, "The whole time".
• Happiness may well consist primarily of an attitude toward time.
  Robert Grudin
• Change is a process, not an event.
• Step Seven says a whole life geared to self-centredness cannot be set in reverse all at once. This is a programme of one day at a time. And practice makes for progress.
• Yesterday is a cancelled cheque, tomorrow is a promissory note, today is cash in hand; spend it wisely.
• Half our life is spent trying to find something to do with the time we have rushed through life trying to save.
• The space between yesterday and today is filled with acceptance, forgiveness and remembering to laugh.
• You can measure distance by time. "How far away is it?"
  "Oh about 20 minutes."
  But it doesn't work the other way. "When do you get off work?"
  "Around 3 miles."
• We live in deeds, not in years ...
  Gamailial Bailey
• Our life on earth is but a moment in the great galactic event of endless possibilities.
• One day at a time Life is managing me.

UNIVERSALITY

• Each day gently reminds me, that we're all a part, that we all love each other, in the family of heart.
  Inner Thoughts And Visions
• The destruction of a human being, no matter the form that destruction takes, leaves an incredible void in the universe
• We may not have it all together but, together, we have it all.
• Opinions are like that part of the anatomy we all sit on. Each of has one and at one time or another, they all stink.
• The world breaks everyone, and afterwards, some are strong at the broken places.
  Ernest Hemingway
• We all know that God never closes one door without opening another... but it can be painful in the hallway.
• There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance — that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
  Herbert Spencer

VISIONS

• It is the soul's duty to be loyal to its own desires.
  Rebecca West
• Hunting God is a great adventure.
  Marie DeFloris
• Solitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present.
  Thomas Merton
• Nothing is as sweet as the smell of hope in the air.
• Because you cannot see Him, God is everywhere.
  Yasunari Kawabata
• I saw the universe to be lighted by God's love; I was alone no more.
  Bill W.
• My sobriety is a gift from God. What I do with it is my gift back to Him.
• With them I gladly shared my all and learned the truth that where God guides, He provides.
  Frank N. D. Buchman
• The wonders and mysteries of God's work are all around us. Sobriety and recovery are some of God's finest gifts.
• I would rather live in a world where my life is surrounded by mystery than live in a world so small that my mind could comprehend it.
  Harry Emerson Fosdick
• To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand.
  Jose Ortega y Gasset
• Simplicity, clarity, singleness: these are the attributes that give our lives power and vividness and joy.
  Richard Halloway

WISDOM

• I have felt that AA is a group unto themselves and their best results can be had under their own guidance, as a result of their philosophy.
  Dr G. Kirby Collier, Alcoholics Anonymous (3rd edition)
• The cup that cheers is also the cup that can kill.
• I don't do drugs anymore 'cause I find I get the same effect just by standing up really fast.
  Johnathan Katz
• If it works, don't fix it.
• Where lipstick is concerned, the important thing is not colour, but to accept God's final word on where your lips end.
  Jerry Seinfeld
• Art is the only way to run away without leaving home.
  Twyla Tharp
• Friendship always benefits; love sometimes injures.
• A comprehended God is no God at all.
  Gerhard Tersteegen
• If all you have is lemons, then you make lemonade.
• I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.
  Jimmy Dean
• Money ain't much if it's all you got.
• Just think how much deeper the ocean would be if sponges did not live there.
• If you're gonna pray for potatoes you better have a hoe in your hand.
• A free press is not a privilege but an organic necessity in a great society ...
  Walter Lippmann
• Religion is for people who are afraid of going to hell; spirituality is for those who have been there.
  Ross V
• A saint is one who exaggerates what the world neglects.
  G. K. Chesterton
• Truth doesn't care who says it.
• We never know the worth of water till the well is dry.
  English proverb

XTRANEOUS

• St. Stephen is the patron saint of bricklayers.
• The names of the three wise monkeys are:
  Mizaru: See no evil,
  Mikazaru: Hear no evil,
  Mazaru: Speak no evil.
• We can't all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.
  Will Rogers
• Sometimes I think war is God's way of teaching us geography.
  Paul Rodriguez
• Smile, folks will wonder what you've been up to!

YOU SAID IT

• Why is the word abbreviation so long?
• The verb "cleave" is the only English word with two synonyms which are antonyms of each other: "adhere" and "separate."
• Can you be a closet claustrophobic?
• Why is bra singular and panties plural?
• Is it possible to be totally partial?
• Pinocchio is Italian for "pine head."
• Is there another word for synonym?
• What's another word for thesaurus?

ZOOLOGY

• After eating, do amphibians need to wait an hour before getting out of the water?
• An animal epidemic is called an epizootic.
• Camel's milk does not curdle.
• Why don't they just make mouse-flavoured cat food?
• If a cow laughed, would milk come out her nose?
• Why does moisture ruin leather? Aren't cows outside a lot of the time? When it's raining, do cows go up to the farmhouse, "Let us in. We're all wearing leather, open the door! We're going to ruin the whole outfit here."
• Do hungry crows have ravenous appetites?
• A duck's quack doesn't echo, and no one knows why.
• All elephants walk on tiptoe, because the back portion of their foot is made up of all fat and no bone.
• Emus and kangaroos cannot walk backwards, and are on the Australian coat of arms for that reason.
• What do you do when you see an endangered animal that eats only endangered plants?
• Why does Sea World have a seafood restaurant? I'm halfway through my fishburger and I realise, Oh my Gosh ... I could be eating a slow learner.
  Lynda Montgomery
• A group of geese on the ground is a gaggle, a group of geese in the air is a skein.
• The underside of a horse's hoof is called a frog. The frog peels off several times a year with new growth.
• All porcupines float in water.
• When it rains, why don't sheep shrink?

  Oh dear! I have run out of quotes!
  

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  me

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  This is where I have to thank folks
  

• I think many more of the humorous items should be credited to Jerry Seinfeld, but they were not specifically identified by the friends who sent them to me.
• Many, many of the one-liners were lifted from mails and sigfiles I received from all over the world. Thanks, guys.
• Many others I first came across while reading "In God's Care", published by Hazelden. Thank you.
• Finally; if one of yours has found its way here and you would like a mention, please drop me a mail by clicking on the icon above.
• Thank you for visiting my site. There are a number of other pages of inspirational writings, which you can reach by choosing one of the links which follow.

 

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Page last updated 17 October 1999
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