Quotes About Addiction

No other road, no other way, no day but today

You only grow if you’re willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.

No individual raindrop considers itself responsible for the flood.

Your altitude is determined by your attitude.

Do not wait for your ship to come in – swim out to it.

Champions in any field have made a habit of doing what others find boring or uncomfortable.

Believe more deeply. Hold your face up to the light, even though for the moment you do not see.

Alcohol ruined me financially and morally, broke my heart and the hearts of too many others. Even though it did this to me and it almost killed me and I haven’t touched a drop of it in seventeen years, sometimes I wonder if I could get away with drinking some now. I totally subscribe to the notion that alcoholism is a mental illness because thinking like that is clearly insane.

Drink does not drown care, but waters it, and makes it grow faster.

When everything seems like an uphill struggle, just think of the view from the top

It is easy to get a thousand prescriptions but hard to get one single remedy.

The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun’s rays. Night of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural economy of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heart of the desert–a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.

If you have made mistakes, there is always another chance for you. You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.

No man or woman is uniformly successful… we must all expect a rather high percentage of failure in the things we attempt.

Don’t spend your precious time asking ‘Why isn’t the world a better place?’ It will only be time wasted. The question to ask is ‘How can I make it better?’ To that there is an answer.

Never frown because you never know who might be falling in love with your smile.

If a man does his best, what else is there?

Ideals are like stars; you will not succeed in touching them with your hands, but like the seafaring man on the desert of waters, you choose them as your guides, and following them, you reach your destiny.

There’s only us, there’s only this, forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No other road, no other way, no day but today.

For all sad words of tongue and pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been’.

Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal. The winner is he who gives himself to his work, body and soul.

Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

There are two things to aim at in life: first to get what you want; and after that, to enjoy it. Only the wisest of mankind achieve the second.

Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.

Each of us is great insofar as we perceive and act on the infinite possibilities which lie undiscovered and unrecognized about us.

Drugs are merely the most obvious form of addiction in our society. Drug addiction is one of the things that undermines traditional values.

When you come to a roadblock, take a detour.

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

A hero is one who knows how to hang on one minute longer.

Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections, but instantly set about remedying them – every day begin the task anew.

Expect the dawn of a new beginning in the dark nights of life.

Don’t let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No stream or gas ever drives anything until it is confined. No Niagara ever turned light and power until it is tunneled. No life ever grows great until it is focused, dedicated, disciplined.

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

Convictions are the mainsprings of action, the driving powers of life. What a man lives are his convictions.

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

The greatest revolution of our generation is the discovery that human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.

Opportunities multiply as they are seized.

Knowledge itself is power.

The proof of a well-trained mind is that it rejoices in which is good and grieves at the opposite.

Natural ability without education has more often raised a man to glory and virtue than education without natural ability.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not; but remember that what you have was once among the things only hoped for.

We know truth, not only by reason, but also by the heart.

Bad times, hard times – this is what people keep saying; but let us live well, and times shall be good. We are the times: Such as we are, such are the times.

The rung of a ladder was never meant to rest upon, but only to hold a man’s foot long enough to enable him to put the other somewhat higher.

Truth always rests with the minority, and the minority is always stronger than the majority, because the minority is generally formed by those who really have an opinion, while the strength of a majority is illusory, formed by the gangs who have no opinion—and who, therefore, in the next instant (when it is evident that the minority is the stronger) assume its opinion … while Truth again reverts to a new minority.

A man’s true state of power and riches is to be in himself.

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

If at first an idea isn’t absurd there is no hope for it.

How lovely to think that no one need wait a moment, we can start now, start slowly changing the world! How lovely that everyone, great and small, can make their contribution toward introducing justice straightaway… And you can always, always give something, even if it is only kindness!

Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

Face your deficiencies and acknowledge them; but do not let them master you. Let them teach you patience, sweetness, insight.

Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.

I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble.

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.

A man who dares to waste one hour of life has not discovered the value of life.

Great works are performed, not by strength, but perseverance.

As a rule, men worry more about what they can’t see than about what they can.

Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.

I am not bound to win, but I am bound to be true. I am not bound to succeed, but I am bound to live up to what light I have.

Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to success is more important than any other one thing.

Ability has nothing to do with opportunity.

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty

The superior man is distressed by the limitations of his ability; he is not distressed by the fact that men do not recognize the ability that he has.

If I accept you as you are, I will make you worse; however if I treat you as though you are what you are capable of becoming, I help you become that.

As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world… as in being able to remake ourselves.

We cannot, in a moment, get rid of habits of a lifetime.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat.

No-one can make you feel inferior without your consent.

I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.

Good people are good because they’ve come to wisdom through failure. We get very little wisdom from success, you know… One who doesn’t try cannot fail and become wise.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.

Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?

Continuous effort, not strength or intelligence, is the key to unlocking our potential.

To do anything in this world worth doing, we must not stand back shivering and thinking of the cold and danger; but jump in, and scramble through as well as we can.

You become what you behold.

Man is what he believes.

Facing it, always facing it, that’s the way to get through. Face it.

But I will say that the drugs are much more ferocious then they used to be. There are people wrecking their lives with addiction, which seems much more severe.

This world is but canvas to our imaginations.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.

You’ve recognized a fundamental feature of an addict’s life. Maintaining your habit is so important you’ve no real interest in anything else.

When you can stop you don’t want to, and when you want to stop, you can’t…

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

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

Move out of your comfort zone. You can only grow if you are willing to feel awkward and uncomfortable when you try something new.

Meaning doesn’t lie in things. Meaning lies in us. When we attach value to things that aren’t love – the money, the car, the house, the prestige – we are loving things that can’t love us back. We are searching for meaning in the meaningless. Money, of itself, means nothing. Material things, of themselves, mean nothing. It’s not that they’re bad. It’s that they’re nothing.

What comes out of you when you are squeezed is what is inside of you.

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.

Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see their beauty, believe in them, and try to follow where they lead.

Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values.

No one’s happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy.

Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won. It exists, it is real, it is possible, it is yours.

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

Remember, today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday.

Did you ever see an unhappy horse? Did you ever see bird that had the blues? One reason why birds and horses are not unhappy is because they are not trying to impress other birds and horses.

Take a chance! All life is a chance. The man who goes the furthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare.

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

The question is frequently asked: Why does a man become a drug addict? The answer is that he usually does not intend to become an addict. You don’t wake up one morning and decide to be a drug addict. It takes at least three months’ shooting twice a day to get any habit at all. And you don’t really know what junk sickness is until you have had several habits. It took me almost six months to get my first habit, and then the withdrawal symptoms were mild. I think it no exaggeration to say it takes about a year and several hundred injections to make an addict. The questions, of course, could be asked: Why did you ever try narcotics? Why did you continue using it long enough to become an addict? You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in the other direction. Junk wins by default. I tried it as a matter of curiosity. I drifted along taking shots when I could score. I ended up hooked. Most addicts I have talked to report a similar experience. They did not start using drugs for any reason they can remember. They just drifted along until they got hooked. If you have never been addicted, you can have no clear idea what it means to need junk with the addict’s special need. You don’t decide to be an addict. One morning you wake up sick and you’re an addict.

There was a reason my first substantial role after rehab was to play a maniac whose personal story ended badly. I knew what it was like to go those dark places. I played a guy who died as a result of his abuse.

Cocaine for me was a place to hide. Most people get hyper on coke. It slowed me down. Sometimes it made me paranoid and impotent, but mostly it just made me withdrawn.

Even as a junkie I stayed true [to vegetarianism] – “I shall have heroin, but I shan’t have a hamburger.” What a sexy little paradox.

Getting sober was one of the three pivotal events in my life, along with becoming an actor and having a child. Of the three, finding my sobriety was the hardest thing.

Amy [Winehouse] changed pop music forever, I remember knowing there was hope, and feeling not alone because of her. She lived jazz, she lived the blues.

I got sober. I stopped killing myself with alcohol. I began to think: ‘Wait a minute – if I can stop doing this, what are the possibilities? And slowly it dawned on me that it was maybe worth the risk.

I have other obligations now – the show, my family, my life… though I know that without my sobriety I wouldn’t have any of those things.