Practice These Principles Quotes

“When we look back from the vantage point of sobriety, many of us realize that when drinking we often felt like a fake, a fraud, and a phony. That’s because we were. – p. 74”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“In AA we don’t come to God through theology but through experience, mostly of the humbling and humiliating variety, often reluctantly, and sometimes even kicking and screaming. – p. 179”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“The truth is that we were so spiritually and morally bankrupt that we could not even see some of those lines: we stepped over them blindly. Other times we saw the lines alright, but we wanted to cross them. Alcohol gave us the false courage to do it and numbed our conscience as we did. Alcohol was the great enabler, and the great anesthetic. It wasn’t God who was dead. We were. – p. 116”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“Yet, Step 2 and AA spirituality is about nothing if it isn’t about faith in God. Many good reasons exist why AA makes a distinction between religion and spirituality, but a denial of God is not one of them. – p. 127”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“We arrive in the rooms tangled up in a web of complexity and confusion. Our lives are unmanageable because our minds are unmanageable.” – p. 134”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“To know that we are not God, to know that there is a God, and to know that God, these are the Steps in their essence. – p. 93”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“Gratitude becomes spiritual, a spiritual virtue and a spiritual emotion, when we are moved in our response by a God-centered view of the three: gift, recipient, and giver. – p. 56”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“The essence of humility in Step 3 is acknowledging and accepting our dependence on God. The essence of faith is trusting God. – p. 167”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“AA is a spiritual program and Step 3 is a quintessentially spiritual Step. It is the ultimate anti-self Step. Thus, in a very real sense, we cannot practice the 12 Steps of AA merely as self-help. They are not intended to be. – p. 159”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“Adam and Eve had first-hand empirical evidence of God’s existence. He walked in the Garden with them. Their problem was that God told them they could not eat of a certain tree. – p. 113”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety

“The first gulp from the glass of natural science will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.”
― Ray A., Practice These Principles : Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety – Steps 1, 2, 3

“physicist Lord Kelvin wrote that “If you study science deep enough and long enough, it will force you to believe in God.”
― Ray A., Practice These Principles : Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety – Steps 1, 2, 3

“Louis Pasteur, founder of microbiology and immunology. “A little science distances you from God,” he wrote, “but a lot of science brings you nearer to Him.”
― Ray A., Practice These Principles : Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety – Steps 1, 2, 3

“For Plato, the problem of evil is a problem of knowledge. People do wrong because they do not know what is right. If they knew what was right, obviously, they would do it.” This is the idea of human perfectibility that still predominates in secular culture. This says that our basic problem is ignorance, and the solution knowledge. “But Paul denies that this is so,” continues this writer. “His claim is that even though he knows something is wrong, he still does it. Why? Because the human will is corrupt. The problem of evil is not a problem of knowledge but a problem of will.”4 We”
― Ray A., Practice These Principles : Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety – Steps 1, 2, 3

“There is as well a two-way interaction between virtue and discipline. As we continue to practice the discipline of self-examination and continue to take inventory, we grow in the virtues of humility and honesty, and, conversely, as we grow in these virtues we become better at looking at ourselves and discerning our shortcomings. Promptly admitting our wrongs to those we have harmed will become a habit with time, disposing us to justice, and, the more just we become, the more readily and openly will we admit to such wrongs.”
― Ray A., Practice These Principles : Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety – Steps 1, 2, 3

“These tools are the virtues, and just as there is a right tool for every job, so there is a virtue for every activity. To use the right tool, we need to know the job we are doing. To be able to do this, we need to correlate the things we do with the virtues that can best achieve them. We get the necessary training through the practice of the disciplines. As we get better at making these connections, we will enter situations equipped with the right tools, the attitudes, spiritual and emotional dispositions required to bring the most good out of any situation.”
― Ray A., Practice These Principles : Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety – Steps 1, 2, 3

“Religion became an end, rather than a means, a substitute for God. Until alcoholism intervened and forced the issue: God, or religion? – p. 125”
― Ray A, Practice These Principles: Living the Spiritual Disciplines and Virtues in 12-Step Recovery to Achieve Spiritual Growth, Character Development, and Emotional Sobriety