Sobriety Quotes

“It’s a great advantage not to drink among hard drinking people.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian.”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale

“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.”
― tom robbins

“And now I'm right back where I started. Sober and miserable.”
― Alyson Noel, Evermore

“Of course, it is very important to be sober when you take an exam. Many worthwhile careers in the street-cleansing, fruit-picking and subway-guitar-playing industries have been founded on a lack of understanding of this simple fact.”
― Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures

“I once heard a sober alcoholic say that drinking never made him happy, but it made him feel like he was going to be happy in about fifteen minutes. That was exactly it, and I couldn’t understand why the happiness never came, couldn’t see the flaw in my thinking, couldn’t see that alcohol kept me trapped in a world of illusion, procrastination, paralysis. I lived always in the future, never in the present. Next time, next time! Next time I drank it would be different, next time it would make me feel good again. And all my efforts were doomed, because already drinking hadn’t made me feel good in years.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“Your best days are ahead of you. The movie starts when the guy gets sober and puts his life back together; it doesn't end there.”
― Bucky Sinister, Get Up: A 12-Step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos

“When you quit drinking you stop waiting.”
― Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story

“There is no better high than discovery.”
― E. O. Wilson

“I've always believed clear-eyed sobriety was for the harder hearted.”
― Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects

“Which is recorded of Socrates, that he was able both to abstain from, and to enjoy, those things which many are too weak to abstain from, and cannot enjoy without excess. But to be strong enough both to bear the one and to be sober in the other is the mark of a man who has a perfect and invincible soul.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“I personally believe this: We have only today; yesterday's gone and tomorrow is uncertain. That's why they call it the present. And sobriety really is a gift... for those who are willing to receive it.”
― Ace Frehley, No Regrets: A Rock 'n' Roll Memoir

“Blind, broke, jobless, and frustrated, Kevin found it difficult to get through the following few months. But he had one big thing going for him.
He was sober.
It was a new beginning.”
― Traci Medford-Rosow, Unblinded: One Man’s Courageous Journey Through Darkness to Sight

“We have learned that the satisfaction of instincts cannot be the sole aim of our lives.”
― Alcoholics Anonymous World Services, Twelve Steps and Twelve Traditions

“My mind may be sober, but my confidence is high!”
― Habeeb Akande

“There are hours for rest, and hours for wakefulness; nights for sobriety and nights for drunkenness—(if only so that possession of the former allows us to discern the latter when we have it; for sad as it is, no human body can be happily drunk all the time).”
― Roman Payne, Rooftop Soliloquy

“To sober up seems to many like making life “so serious,” as if seriousness precluded joy, warmth, spontaneity and fun. But there can be a delusional, blind quality to non-sober festivities. To have our eyes open soberly with all our senses and memory intact allows some of the most rewarding, soul-nourishing, and long-lasting pleasures possible.”
― Alexandra Katehakis, Mirror of Intimacy: Daily Reflections on Emotional and Erotic Intelligence

“I kept waiting for something bigger, something more profound, something that I could hitch myself to and be carried away once and for all to the heaven-on-earth that I deserved. I kept struggling for control, which was really a demand for everything I wanted--peace, happiness, love, perfection--all at once, right now, and for all time. I wanted life to be perfect, always. And when it wasn't, which was most of the time, I got really anxious, and when I got anxious, I started thinking about how good it would feel to get high again. ”
― William Cope Moyers

“We want ecstasy as a way of life, not a liver-poisoning alcoholiday from it.”
― Crimethinc, Anarchy and Alcohol

“Sex parties, alcohol and drugs lost their appeal to Sven after a while. Music never did, in his continual search for that sober connection--intimacy with one person over a long period of time, as opposed to periods of intimacy with a bunch of random faces.”
― Jess C. Scott, Sven

“Could man be drunk for ever
      With liquor, love, or fights,
Lief should I rouse at morning
      And lief lie down of nights.

But men at whiles are sober
      And think by fits and starts,
And if they think, they fasten
      Their hands upon their hearts.”
― A.E. Housman, The Collected Poems

“I had no idea what time I’d left, how I’d gotten home, who’d been up here, and how long he, she, or they had stayed. Another night, added to the hundreds that had gone before, shrouded in mystery. Really, when you thought about it, it was creepy. My own life was a secret to me.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“I wanted a drink. There were a hundred reasons why a man will want a drink, but I wanted one now for the most elementary reason of all. I didn't want to feel what I was feeling, and a voice within was telling me that I needed a drink, that I couldn't bear it without it.

But that voice is a liar. You can always bear the pain. It'll hurt, it'll burn like acid in an open wound, but you can stand it. And, as long as you can make yourself go on choosing the pain over the relief, you can keep going.”
― Lawrence Block, Out on the Cutting Edge

“Just as others pray daily, you should think to yourself daily about what you can do to be closer to this Ideal Image. Think: "What can I do today to make my life better?" "What can I do to become more like my Ideal Image?”
― Bucky Sinister, Get Up: A 12-Step Guide to Recovery for Misfits, Freaks, and Weirdos

“Was I being groomed for some special mission? What possible purpose could an existence like mine serve? When I wasn’t drinking in crappy bars, I was home by myself reading: a life that was achingly lonely, and yet perversely designed to prevent anybody from ever getting close enough to really know me.”
― Heather King, Parched: A Memoir

“...being sober delivered almost everything drinking promised.”
― Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy

“Someone who is trying to be sober is often trying to work out deeper emotional issues and is attempting to undo years of habitual behavior. When you reduce recovery to just abstinence, it simplifies what is really a much more complex issue.”
― Sasha Bronner

“And I'd started thinking about my mother's last weeks--the way she'd drifted listlessly about the house in her dressing gown, cigarettes in one hand, glass of something strong-smelling in the other. ”
― Anna Davis, Cheet

“It is the tendency of deep feeling to subdue the manner rather than to render it too energetic.”
― Charles Haddon Spurgeon, Lectures to My Students

“Your addiction is not your identity, but you won't know that until you're in recovery; that's when the two separate.”
― Toni Sorenson