The 164 and More book is sold on this website at the Publisher List Price of $20.00 plus postage.
The book may also be sold by Intergroup/Central Offices or recovery book stores at List Price
or slightly higher. But beware of others that sell the book marked up 400% or more.
For the same money, you could buy 4 books and use 3 as sponsee gifts.
From the books ... Alcoholics Anonymous (Big Book) and Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions (12 & 12)
Click the page number or the book cover icon
to view that page in the literature.1.
2.
So we clean house with the family, asking each morning in meditation that our Creator show us the way of patience, tolerance, kindliness
and love.
3.
4.
5.
But its object is always the same: to improve our conscious contact with God, with His grace, wisdom, and love.
6.
7.
8.
9.
Another feeling we are very likely to entertain is one of resentment that love and loyalty could not cure our husbands of alcoholism.
10.
When by devoted service to
family, friends, business, or community we
attract widespread affection and are sometimes singled out for posts of greater responsibility
and trust, we try to be humbly grateful and exert ourselves the more in a spirit of love and service.
11.
12.
If they sense these things,
they will not take so seriously his periods of crankiness, depression,
or apathy, which will disappear when there is tolerance, love, and spiritual understanding.
13.
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.
14.
We do talk about each other a great deal, but we almost invariably temper such talk by a spirit of love and tolerance.
15.
Can we bring the same spirit of love and tolerance into our sometimes deranged family lives that we bring to our A.A. group?
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
Courtesy, kindness, justice, and love are the keynotes by which we may come
into harmony with practically anybody.
21.
22.
The moment we catch even a glimpse of God's will, the moment we begin to see truth, justice, and love as the real and eternal things in life, we are no longer deeply disturbed by all the
seeming evidence to the
contrary that surrounds
us in purely human affairs.
23.
We sometimes hurt those we love because they need to be "taught a lesson," when we really want to punish.
24.
Demands made upon other people for too much attention, protection,
and love can only invite domination or revulsion
in the protectors themselves -- two emotions quite as unhealthy as the demands
which evoked them.
25.
If a sufficiently strong reason -- ill health, falling in love, change of environment, or
the warning of a doctor --
becomes operative, this
man can also stop or moderate, although he may find it difficult and troublesome and may even need medical attention.
26.
It occurred to us that we could take what we had into the factories and cause laborers and capitalists
to love each other.
27.
28.
It is only where "boy meets girl on A.A. campus," and love follows at first sight, that difficulties
may develop.
29.
Finally, we begin to see that all people, including ourselves, are
to some extent emotionally ill as well as frequently wrong, and then we approach true tolerance and see what real love for our fellows actually means.
30.
Then he asked for the grace to
bring love, forgiveness, harmony, truth, faith, hope, light, and joy to every human being he could.
31.
Service, gladly rendered, obligations squarely met, troubles well accepted or solved with God's help, the knowledge that at home or in
the world outside we are partners in a common effort, the well-understood fact that in God's sight all human beings are important, the proof that
love freely given surely brings a full return, the certainty that
we are no longer isolated and alone in self-constructed prisons, the surety that we need no longer be square pegs in round holes but can fit and belong in God's scheme of things -- these are
the permanent and legitimate satisfactions of right living for which no amount of pomp and circumstance, no heap of material possessions, could possibly be substitutes.
32.
From great numbers of such experiences, we could
predict that the doubter
who still claimed that he
hadn't got the "spiritual angle," and who still considered his well-loved A.A. group the higher power, would presently love God and call Him by name.
33.
34.
35.
Under these compulsions
of self-preservation, duty, and love, it is not strange that our Society has
concluded that it has but one high mission -- to carry the A.A. message to those who don't know there's a way out.
36.
37.
38.
We never thought of making honesty, tolerance, and true love of man and God the daily basis of living.
39.
40.
He finds himself in possession of a degree of
honesty, tolerance, unselfishness, peace of
mind, and love of which he had
thought himself quite incapable.
41.
Let us become willing to partake and be strengthened and lifted
up by the sheer spiritual power, beauty, and love of which these
magnificent words are
the carriers.
42.
43.
44.
When they talked of a God personal to me, who was love,
superhuman strength
and direction, I became
irritated and my mind snapped shut against such a theory.
45.
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted -- to understand, than to be understood -- to love, than
to be loved.
46.
At these critical moments, if we remind ourselves that "it is better
to comfort than to be comforted, to understand
than to be understood, to love than to be loved," we will be following the intent of Step Eleven.
47.
48.
When the Twelfth Step is seen in its full implication, it is really talking about the kind of love that has no price tag
on it.
49.
"Lord, make me a channel of thy peace -- that where there is hatred, I may bring love -- that where there is wrong, I
may bring the spirit of forgiveness -- that where there is discord, I may bring harmony -- that where there is error, I may bring truth -- that where there is doubt, I may bring faith -- that where there is despair, I may bring hope -- that where there are shadows, I may bring light -- that where there is sadness, I may bring joy.
50.
So we of A.A. do obey spiritual principles, first because we must, and ultimately because we love the kind of life such obedience brings.
51.
Can we love the whole pattern of living as eagerly as we do the small segment of it we discover
when we try to help other alcoholics achieve sobriety?
52.
53.
We really love them.
54.
55.
He is not likely to get far in any direction if he fails to show unselfishness and
love under his own roof.
56.
We found that dependence
upon His perfect justice, forgiveness, and
love was healthy, and that it
would work where nothing else would.
57.
But how many men and women speak love with their lips, and believe what they say, so that
they can hide lust in a dark corner of their minds?
58.
The 164 and More™ Book, eBook, and Web Site
are all CONCORDANCES which display passages from the Big Book
Alcoholics Anonymous, the
Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions,
and the A.A. Grapevine (A.A. Preamble only).
Sorting and rendering passages in the proprietary format of the
164 and More concordance does not in any way imply
affiliation with or endorsement by either Alcoholics Anonymous World Services
Inc., or the A.A. Grapevine, Inc. Further A.A.W.S. Inc. and the A.A.
Grapevine Inc. have no objection to the use of this material in the
164 and More concordance.
Copyright © 2005-2023, Recovery Press LLC; All Rights Reserved.