• An over-indulgence of anything, even something as pure as water, can intoxicate. – Criss Jami

• Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol or morphine or idealism. – Carl Jung

• Quitting smoking is easy, I’ve done it hundreds of times. – Mark Twain

• Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it’s like a rat in a maze. We all want the same thing. We all have this hole. The thing you want offers relief, but it’s a trap. – Tess Callahan

• What is addiction, really? It is a sign, a signal, a symptom of distress. It is a language that tells us about a plight that must be understood. – Alice Miller

• At every stage, addiction is driven by one of the most powerful, mysterious, and vital forces of human existence. What drives addiction is longing, a longing not just of brain, belly, or loins but finally of the heart. – Cornelius Platinga

• You know you’re an alcoholic when you misplace things for like a decade. – Paul Williams

• Addiction begins with the hope that something “out there” can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. – Jean Kilbourne

• The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics is wholly irrational until you understand that they are completely powerless over their addiction and unless they have structured help, they have no hope. – Russell Brand

• At first, addiction is maintained by pleasure, but the intensity of this pleasure gradually diminishes and the addiction is then maintained by the avoidance of pain. – Frank Tallis

• You can get the monkey off your back, but the circus never leaves town. – Anne Lamott

• Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday. – Dale Carnegie

• I admire addicts. In a world where everybody is waiting for some blind, random disaster, or some sudden disease, the addict has the comfort of knowing what will most likely wait for him down the road. He’s taken some control over his ultimate fate, and his addiction keeps the cause of death from being a total surprise. – Chuck Palahniuk

• The initial journey towards sobriety is a delicate balance between insight into one’s desire for escape and abstinence from one’s addiction. – Debra L. Kaplan

• Addiction is an adaptation. It’s not you–it’s the cage you live in. – Johann Hari

• The dead drug leaves a ghost behind. At certain hours it haunts the house. – Jean Cocteau

• Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. – Mark Twain

• The unfortunate thing about this world is that good habits are so much easier to give up than bad ones. – Somerset Maugham

• Addiction doesn’t kill the addict. It kills the family, kids and people who tried to help! – Unknown

• The first thing in the human personality that dissolves in alcohol is dignity. – Unknown

• Addiction, When you can give up something any time, as long as it’s next Tuesday. – Nikki Sixx

• Addiction is a symptom of not growing up. – C. C. DeVille

• Imagine trying to live without air. Now imagine something worse. – Amy Reed

• Reality is just a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs. – Robin Williams

• First you take a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you. – Francis Fitzgerald

• Addiction, at its worst, is akin to having Stockholm Syndrome. You’re like a hostage who has developed an irrational affection for your captor. They can abuse you, torture you, even threaten to kill you, and you’ll remain inexplicably and disturbingly loyal. –
  Anne Clendening

• Recovery from addiction requires hard work, a proper attitude and learning skills to stay sober, not drinking alcohol or using other drugs. Successful drug recovery or alcohol recovery involves changing attitudes, acquiring knowledge, and developing skills to meet the many challenges of sobriety. – Dennis Daley

• All the suffering, stress and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for. – Jon Kabat-Zinn

• Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending. – Carl Bard

• You can come out of the furnace of trouble two ways: if you let it consume you, you come out a cinder; but there is a kind of metal which refuses to be consumed, and comes out a star. – Jean Church

• Sometimes you can only find heaven by slowly backing away from hell. – Carrie Fisher

If you can quit for a day, you can quit for a lifetime. – Benjamin Alire Sáenz

• I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom. – Edgar Allan Poe

• These feelings, no matter how painful, are part of living. Today, we are alive – not anesthetized, not sedated, not passed out. Take control of your feelings and through action you can change. Today, as every day of sober living, we have a choice. – Ann D. Clark

• The deepest human defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become. – Ashley Montagu

• Do not think that what your thoughts dwell on does not matter. Your thoughts are making you. – Bishop Steere

• My fear of abandonment is exceeded only by my terror of intimacy. – Ethlie Ann Vare

• Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny. – C.S. Lewis

• I wanted to write about the moment when your addictions no longer hide the truth from you. When your whole life breaks down. That’s the moment when you have to somehow choose what your life is going to be about. – Chuck Palahniuk

• It is better to light one small candle than to curse the darkness. – Confucius

• One of the things you learn in rehab is that you’re responsible for your own actions. – Dale Archer

• Here I am trying to live, or rather, I am trying to teach the death within me how to live. – Jean Cocteau

• An intelligent person can rationalize anything, a wise person doesn’t try. – Jen Knox

• A nail is driven out by another nail. Habit is overcome by habit. – Desiderius Erasmus

• No one told me you can love someone and still be miserable. How is that possible? – Krista Ritchie

• Every moment of resistance to temptation is a victory. – Frederick W. Faber

• If you are an approval addict, your behavior is as easy to control as that of any other junkie. All a manipulator need do is a simple two-step process: Give you what you crave, and then threaten to take it away. Every drug dealer in the world plays this game. – Harriet B. Braiker

• Shame was an emotion he had abandoned years earlier. Addicts know no shame. You disgrace yourself so many times you become immune to it. – John Grisham

• Addiction begins with the hope that something ‘out there’ can instantly fill up the emptiness inside. – Jean Kilbourne

• Your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself. – Joseph Campbell

• Drugs are a bet with your mind. – Jim Morrison

• A good addiction is a contradiction in terms. Anything people can’t give up or must have is not healthy, no matter what the activity. – Jody Dean

• We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking. – Santosh Kalwar

• Every habit he’s ever had is still there in his body, lying dormant like flowers in the desert. Given the right conditions, all his old addictions would burst into full and luxuriant bloom. – Margaret Atwood

• The opposite of addiction is not sobriety, it’s human connection. – Johann Hari

• There are all kinds of addicts, I guess. We all have pain. And we all look for ways to make the pain go away. – Sherman Alexie

• Drugs are a waste of time. They destroy your memory and your self-respect and everything that goes along with your self-esteem. – Kurt Cobain

• Failure is a detour, not a dead-end street. – Zig Ziglar

• People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily. – Zig Ziglar

• When you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t. – Luke Davies

• Once you learn to quit, it becomes a habit. – Vince Lombardi

• The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. – Nassim Nicholas Taleb

• We use all kinds of ways to escape – all addictions stem from this moment when we meet our edge and we just can’t stand it. We feel we have to soften it, pad it with something, and we become addicted to whatever it is that seems to ease the pain. – Pema Chodron

• Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions, or death. – Russell Brand

• An addict is someone who uses their body to tell society that something is wrong. – Stella Adler

• If we are facing in the right direction, all we have to do is keep on walking. – Zen Proverb

• Not feeling is no replacement for reality. Your problems today are still your problems tomorrow. – Larry Michael Dredla

• What fascinates me about addiction and obsessive behavior is that people would choose an altered state of consciousness that’s toxic and ostensibly destroys most aspects of your normal life, because for a brief moment you feel okay. – Unknown

• Drugs have taught an entire generation of American kids the metric system. – P.J. O’Rourke

• If you know someone who tries to drown their sorrows, you might tell them sorrows know how to swim. – Ann Landers

• Understanding the difference between healthy striving and perfectionism is critical to laying down the shield and picking up your life. Research shows that perfectionism hampers success. In fact, it’s often the path to depression, anxiety, addiction, and life paralysis. – Brene Brown

• Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it fully. – J.K. Rowling