Honesty with ourselves & others gets us sober, but it is tolerance that keeps us that way.
Interpretation
Being honest leads to clarity and sobriety, while tolerance helps maintain it.
This quote by Bill W. emphasizes the importance of honesty in achieving personal clarity and sobriety, suggesting that recognition of one's true self is essential for recovery or personal growth. However, it also highlights that maintaining this state requires continuous tolerance, both for oneself and for others, indicating that patience and understanding are crucial in the journey towards a healthier mindset.
In practice
During a support group meeting, a member could say this quote to emphasize the importance of honesty in recovery.
It must never be forgotten that the purpose of Alcoholics Anonymous is to sober up alcoholics. There is no religious or spiritual requirement for membership. No demands are made on anyone. An experience is offered which members may accept or reject. That is up to them.
Almost without exception alcoholics are tortured by loneliness.
No personal calamity is so crushing that something true and great can't be made of it
Criticism is easier to take when you realize that the only people who aren’t criticized are those who don’t take risks.
It is easy enough to arouse in a listener a desire for what is honorable; for in every one of us nature has laid the foundations or sown the seeds of the virtues. We are born to them all, all of us, and when a person comes along with the necessary stimulus, then those qualities of the personality are awakened, so to speak, from their slumber.
In the hopes of reaching the moon men fail to see the flowers that blossom at their feet.
Follow your passion, we’re often told. But how do you find your passion? Let me put it another way: what is it that breaks your heart about the world? It’s there that you begin to find what moves you. If you want to find your passion, surrender to your heartbreak. Your heartbreak points towards a truer north — and it’s the difficult journey towards it that is, in the truest sense, no mere passing idyllic infatuation, but enduring, tempestuous passion.
Certain people, in their eagerness to construct a world no external threat can penetrate build exaggeratedly high defense againts the outside world, againts new people, new places, different experiences and leave their own world stripped bare. It is there that bitterness begins irrevocable work.
Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.
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