We can try to stop making unreasonable demands upon those we love.

But its object is always the same: to improve our conscious contact with God, with His grace, wisdom, and love.

He stood in the Presence of Infinite Power and Love.

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.

All members of the family should meet upon the common ground of tolerance, understanding and love.

For example, we know of situations in which the alcoholic or his wife have had love affairs.

We have had retaliatory love affairs with other men.

They may not see why their love and devotion did not straighten him out.

Another feeling we are very likely to entertain is one of resentment that love and loyalty could not cure our husbands of alcoholism.

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.

It became a means of exchanging love and service with those about us.

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.

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.

We do talk about each other a great deal, but we almost invariably temper such talk by a spirit of love and tolerance.

Can we bring the same spirit of love and tolerance into our sometimes deranged family lives that we bring to our A.A. group?

Love and tolerance of others is our code.

Here was love, applause, war; moments sublime with intervals hilarious.

Great suffering and great love are A.A.'s disciplinarians; we need no others.

Courtesy, kindness, justice, and love are the keynotes by which we may come into harmony with practically anybody.

Patience, tolerance, understanding and love are the watchwords.

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.

We sometimes hurt those we love because they need to be "taught a lesson," when we really want to punish.

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.

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.

It occurred to us that we could take what we had into the factories and cause laborers and capitalists to love each other.

Not many people can truthfully assert that they love everybody.

It is only where "boy meets girl on A.A. campus," and love follows at first sight, that difficulties may develop.

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.

Then he asked for the grace to bring love, forgiveness, harmony, truth, faith, hope, light, and joy to every human being he could.

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.

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.

He does not expect his brother sufferer to pay him, or even to love him.

There could be no love in such persons, we thought.

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.

They need the counsel and love of a woman who has gone through what you have.

The love of God and man we understood not at all.

We never thought of making honesty, tolerance, and true love of man and God the daily basis of living.

We have tried to hold the love of our children for their father.

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.

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.

We had to drink because at home we were smothered with love or got none at all.

It was impossible to say we had no capacity for faith, or love, or worship.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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?

And even if they did not love their families, how could they be so blind about themselves?

We really love them.

You will learn the full meaning of "Love thy neighbor as thyself."

He is not likely to get far in any direction if he fails to show unselfishness and love under his own roof.

We found that dependence upon His perfect justice, forgiveness, and love was healthy, and that it would work where nothing else would.

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?

You can see that he really does love you with his better self.