Quotes About Acceptance

I picture my epitaph: 'Here lies Paul Newman, who died a failure because his eyes turned brown.

Honey, Don't go shooting all the dogs 'cause one of them's got fleas

I dislike myself when I act like a passive wimp or an aggressive bully. It feels good to feel good, and I want all the good feeling I can get. Essentially, emotional maturity demands on-going, total acceptance of people, places, things and situations as they are, rather than as I might wish them to be.

By feeling secure in my defenselessness, I am able to be my own person. I behave like a successful member of A.A., like a person who practices the Twelve Steps in all his affairs and has ceased fighting everything and everybody. I literally win by not taking the bait, by not fighting.

In dealing with a change, a problem, or a discovery, awareness is often followed by a period of acceptance before we can take action. This process is sometimes referred to as the "Three A's" — Awareness, Acceptance, and Action.

We don't get caught in the trap of letting the situation upset us and then having to stay upset waiting for the situation to change to our satisfaction.

Instead, we accept our powerlessness over the fact of the situation and then calmly do what we can to improve the situation. We trust in God's will knowing that, in general, we are far more efficient and effective when we respond calmly and in an unhurried manner than when we explode in unthinking anger.

Still, we may hesitate to accept an unpleasant reality because we feel that by accepting, we condone something that is intolerable. But this is not the case. As it says so eloquently in One Day at a Time in Al-Anon (ODAT), Acceptance does not mean submission to a degrading situation.

Concerning feelings, the most important point to remember is that everyone has them, and we should never be ashamed nor apologize for feeling the way we do. Feelings have no moral value.

early in sobriety I routinely threw my sobriety at other drivers on the freeway, people who didn't even want it.

our best defense (as stated earlier) is often our defenselessness. In Al-Anon we hear, "Don't complain and don't explain.

On a daily basis, she accepts those facts and stays busy making the best of her own life.

He says there are a total of 54 negative emotions such as fear, anger, depression, resentment, loneliness, etc., and he claims that every one of them is based on blame. Furthermore, he insists that anyone can eliminate all 54 negative emotions from their lives by accepting full responsibility for their feelings and thereby no longer blaming any other person or situation for how they feel.

She was doing what she was doing, not because her actions were helping her daughter—they weren't—but because she felt too uncomfortable doing nothing. Naomi accepted the fact that everything she did was based on selfish motives. She became willing to allow her daughter to take the consequences of her own behavior and thereby perhaps learn what she needed to learn.

An attitude of total acceptance and peace of mind doesn't come naturally to me. I must remain diligently on guard to prevent my feelings, thoughts and actions from being controlled by people and circumstances. My serenity, like finely spun glass, is extremely fragile. My natural tendency is to find fault, see the defect, disapprove, then not accept what I see. I completely forget that acceptance does not imply approval.

I have also made the decision to believe that you and I and every one of us have been doing the best we could at every moment of every day of our lives up to and including this moment. If we could have done better, we would have done better.

Furthermore, if this is true for me, then it is true for you and for every one of us. All along, we did the best we could under the circumstances at that particular time.

I also choose to believe that if I do a thing for the right motive and leave the results up to God, everything will turn out the way it is supposed to. Not necessarily the way I would have chosen, but definitely the way it is supposed to be.

The Big Book says in two places, one of them in italics, that we have ceased fighting anything and anybody.

Sometimes you've just got to let them scream, right?

We all have strategies to distract ourselves from what we cannot bear. Memory, for example, serves such a function.

You can resent your bald spot or be glad you have a head.

It is the mark of an educated man to be able to evaluate a thought without accepting it. ARISTOTLE

Everybody is damaged goods. Everybody got bumps and dents, ja? But sometimes two people fit together, and the bumps go into the dents, and you have a whole thing like a potato.