80 Uplifting Addiction Recovery Quotes

Addictions creep up slowly but once you do realize that you’re addicted to something, it hits you like a brick. In fact, most don’t even consider the possibility of slowly becoming addicted – often until they are caught within the tight grip of addiction. Sadly, the number of addictions one can possibly get trapped in is quite broad. From alcohol, drugs, painkillers, eating disorders, or even less harmful ones such as smartphone addiction – there’s a wide variety of potentially dangerous substances and activities. Even worse, if you’ve ever seen someone suffering from an addiction, you know how grave the consequences can be. If you’re struggling with an addiction or know someone who does, the following quotes about recovery will provide hope, strength, but also the encouragement it takes to create a better and addiction-free future. At the same time, these uplifting addiction recovery quotes provide the fuel to see things through no matter how difficult it may get.

No matter if you’re a little addicted to Facebook or something else, admitting to yourself that there may be a problem is never easy. At the same time, it’s the very first – and perhaps the most important step – towards recovery.

“If pain must come, may it come quickly. Because I have a life to live, and I need to live it in the best way possible.”
Paolo Coelho

By having the courage to be honest with yourself, you lay the important foundation upon which a better life can be built. It will also help you to become aware of possible psychological triggers that led you into an addiction. Even more importantly, once identified, you can address these triggers to overcome whatever you’re struggling with.

The following addiction recovery quotes provide encouragement and hope.

Even though most addictions seem far removed for most of us, we all are confronted with some minor and non-harmful addictions on a daily basis. The real struggle starts when we finally realized that, for instance, watching too much TV is having a drastically negative impact on our life. During these stages of fighting an addiction, it can be quite helpful to have something that encourages you to keep going.

80 Uplifting Addiction Recovery Quotes

The reason why the following quotes about recovery are so powerful is that they stem from people who themselves fought with an addiction. These individuals know what it means to fight against an invisible enemy within oneself for years. At the same time, they also have found brilliant words of encouragement that give you hope and the necessary strength to keep fighting.

Here are these wonderful addiction recovery quotes:

1.

“I’m here to tell you that if you get broken, it’s possible to put yourself back together. I’m here to tell you that if you get lost, it’s possible that a light will come, dancing, on the horizon, to lead you home.”
Nick Lake

2.

“Confront the dark parts of yourself, and work to banish them with illumination and forgiveness. Your willingness to wrestle with your demons will cause your angels to sing.”
August Wilson

3.

“Courage isn’t having the strength to go on – it is going on when you don’t have strength.”
Napoléon Bonaparte

4.

“This is what I think. Addiction is just a way of trying to get at something else. Something bigger. Call it transcendence if you want, but it’s a fucked-up way, 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

5.

“Change must start from the individual. And the individual must want and feel ready to make such change.”
Efrat Cybulkiewicz

6.

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.”
Ernest Hemingway

7.

“Real hope combined with real action has always pulled me through difficult times. Real hope combined with doing nothing has never pulled me through.”
Jenni Schaefer

8.

“That which does not kill us makes us stronger.”
Friedrich Nietzsche

9.

“Whether I or anyone else accepted the concept of alcoholism as a disease didn’t matter; what mattered was that when treated as a disease, those who suffered from it were most likely to recover.”
Craig Ferguson

10.

“[The] little-mentioned paradox of substance addiction is: once you are sufficiently enslaved by a substance to need to quit the substance in order to save your life, the enslaving substance has become so deeply important to you that you will all but lose your mind when it is taken away from you.”
David Foster Wallace

11.

“It is important to our healing that we sort out the belief systems we adopt; belief systems that were taught to us and because they are so full of lies, they lead to all kinds of depressions, addictions and other struggles while we try to cope with the manifestations of the problems instead of the roots of the problems.”
Darlene Ouimet

12.

“God made you for His pleasure. And He made you intrinsically needy and dependent on His unspeakable joy. If you are struggling with sin our addiction, don’t try to kill your appetite for pleasure. It is impossible. Just direct it to the source of all pleasure. You will be amazed to find that He has perfectly and supernaturally designed you to have all your deepest needs met in Him”
John Crowder

13.

“Recovery is hard. Regret is harder.”
Brittany Burgunder

14.

“Compassion is the most powerful tool you can have when it comes to healing addictions of any kind. Put simply, what your partner needs most from you is compassion.”
Christopher Kennedy Lawford

15.

“My identity shifted when I got into recovery. That’s who I am now, and it actually gives me greater pleasure to have that identity than to be a musician or anything else, because it keeps me in a manageable size.”
Eric Clapton

16.

“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.”
Robert Downey, Jr.

17.

“Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.”
Mahatma Gandhi

18.

“One who will not accept solitude, stillness and quiet recurring moments… is caught up in the wilderness of addictions; far removed from an original state of being and awareness. This is ‘dis-ease.”
T.F. Hodge

19.

“There is a saying in Tibetan, ‘Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’ No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.”
Dalai Lama XIV

20.

“Rising from the ashes, I am born again, powerful, exultant, majestic through all the pain.”
Shannon Perry

21.

“No one consciously chooses addiction to a substance or behavior over his partner. There are always reasons – powerful ones – why a person retreats into addiction.”
Christopher Kennedy Lawford

22.

“I found the prospect daunting, but somehow comforting, too, because the counselors insisted it could be done, and, after all, many of them were recovering alcoholics themselves.”
Craig Ferguson

23.

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, a light from the shadows shall spring; renewed shall be blade that was broken, the crownless again shall be king.”
J.R.R. Tolkien

24.

“Pain in this life is not avoidable, but the pain we create avoiding pain is avoidable.”
R.D. Laing

25.

“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

26.

“Believe you can and you’re halfway there.”
Theodore Roosevelt

27.

“From an outsider’s perspective, it would seem like I had it all. It was actually a very lonely time for me because I was suffering from alcoholism… I’ve been the lead in movies, on television shows and nominated for Emmy. But the best thing I can say about me is that people who can’t stop drinking come up to me and say, ‘Can you help me?’ And I can say, ‘Yes.’”
Matthew Perry

28.

“Listen to God with a broken heart. He is not only the doctor who mends it but also the father who wipes away the tears.”
Criss Jami

29.

“It takes strength and courage to admit the truth.”
Rick Riordan

30.

“Anything that inspires addiction or obsession – substances, entertainment, beauty, secrecy – is dangerous in that it can lead to isolation, self-absorption, and disconnection, to paralyzed stasis: an immobility that gathers like a force.”
Greg Carlisle

31.

“One of the hardest things was learning that I was worth recovery.”
Demi Lovato

32.

“Human beings have a deep need to bond and form connections. If we can’t connect with each other, we will connect with whatever we can find … It is disconnection that drives addiction.”
Christopher Kennedy Lawford

33.

“Courage is being scared to death, but saddling up anyway.”
John Wayne

34.

“Even when I took the drugs I realized that this just wasn’t fun anymore. The drugs had become a part of my routine. Something to wake me up. Something to help me sleep. Something to calm my nerves. There was a time when I was able to wake up, go to sleep, and have fun without a pill or a line to help me function. These days it felt like I might have a nervous breakdown if I didn’t have them.”
Cherie Currie

35.

“They tell you how it’ll all get better and better as you abstain and recover: they somehow omit to mention that the way it gets better and you get better is through pain. Not around pain, or in spite of it.”
David Foster Wallace

36.

“Recovery can take place only within the context of relationships. It cannot occur in isolation.”
Judith Herman

37.

“Courage is found in unlikely places.”
J.R.R. Tolkien

38.

“The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of day with some purchased relief.”
Russell Brand

39.

“In a way, we’re all addicts by nature.”
Shannon Mullen

40.

“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

41.

“You are not an alcoholic or an addict. You are not incurably diseased. You have merely become dependent on substances or addictive behavior to cope with underlying conditions that you are now going to heal, at which time your dependency will cease completely and forever.”
Chris Prentiss

42.

“I believe in recovery, and as a role model I have the responsibility to let young people know that you can make a mistake and come back from it.”
Ann Richards

43.

“It gave him instant gratification in a way nothing else did, and as was the case with all addicts, gratification was the important thing.”
Jeet Thayil

44.

“Sin in the world destroys people’s lives through lust, sickness and addiction”
Sunday Adelaja

45.

“You can’t defeat the darkness by keeping it caged inside of you.”
Seth Adam Smith

46.

“The mentality and behavior of drug addicts and alcoholics are 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

47.

“If you are the Old Guy In The Punk House, move out. You have a substance abuse problem.”
Bucky Sinister

48.

“For me, recovery and self-care are inextricably connected. My recovery from abuse, addiction, and a suicide attempt required dumptruck loads of self-care.”
Steve Austin

49.

“Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.”
David Stafford

50.

“The most important thing you can do to support your partner in his [or her]recovery is to show that you are truly supportive and on his [or her]side.”
Christopher Kennedy Lawford

51.

“Everything you need to heal is inside yourself. You only need support and encouragement to listen to yourself—to your thoughts, feelings, imagery, and inner spiritual urgings. A book, like a therapist or group, can only guide you, helping you to say out loud what you dared not say even to yourself.”
Renee Fredrickson

52.

“Temper us in fire, and we grow stronger. When we suffer, we survive.”
Cassandra Clare

53.

“Hardships make or break people.”
Margaret Mitchell

54.

“Life doesn’t get easier or more forgiving, we get stronger and more resilient.”
Steve Maraboli

55.

“Real courage is when you know you’re licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.”
Harper Lee

56.

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the little voice at the end of the day that says I’ll try again tomorrow.”
Mary Anne Radmacher

57.

“Anyone can give up; it is the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone would expect you to fall apart, now that is true strength.”
Chris Bradford

58.

“I think Amy Winehouse’s decision not to go to rehab was a bad one.”
Robert Clark

59.

“Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear – not absence of fear.”
Mark Twain

60.

“The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.”
Criss Jami

61.

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

62.

“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.”
Marian Keyes

63.

“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.”
Anaïs Nin

64.

“I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear.”
Nelson Mandela

65.

“No matter how dark the night may get, your light will never burn out.”
Jeanette LeBlanc

66.

“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
Audre Lorde

67.

“The beauty of being shattered is how the shards become our character and our marks of distinction. This is how we are refined by our pain.”
Bryant McGill

68.

“Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.”
Ann Landers

69.

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”
Paulo Coelho

70.

“Every form of addiction is bad, no matter whether the narcotic be alcohol, morphine or idealism.”
C.G. Jung

71.

“I cannot stand the words Get over it. All of us are under such pressure to put our problems in the past tense. Slow down. Don’t allow others to hurry your healing. It is a process, one that may take years, occasionally, even a lifetime — and that’s OK.”
Beau Taplin

72.

“In the end, some of your greatest pains become your greatest strengths.”
Drew Barrymore

73.

“We have to be braver than we think we can be, because God is constantly calling us to be more than we are.”
Madeleine L’Engle

74.

“Sometimes we self-sabotage just when things seem to be going smoothly. Perhaps this is a way to express our fear about whether it is okay for us to have a better life. We are bound to feel anxious as we leave behind old notions of our unworthiness. The challenge is not to be fearless, but to develop strategies of acknowledging our fears and finding out how we can allay them.”
Maureen Brady

75.

“My only choice was to fight my way out, even if I didn’t think I would make it.”
Laurie Halse Anderson

76.

“You were never created to live depressed, defeated, guilty, condemned, ashamed or unworthy. We were created to be victorious.”
Joel Osteen

77.

“And one has to understand that braveness is not the absence of fear but rather the strength to keep on going forward despite the fear.”
Paulo Coelho

78.

“I’m fighting my way into existence, and I will keep doing so until the end of time.”
Charlotte Eriksson

79.

“I am fallen, flawed and imperfect. Yet drenched in the grace and mercy that is found in Jesus Christ, there is strength”
Adam Young

80.

“You feel your strength in the experience of pain.”
Jim Morrison

In conclusion:

“Keep up your faith to go high and fly, even after so many pains and sorrow. You can turn from a caterpillar to a butterfly. Life gives you a second change: a call to grow.”
Ana Claudia Antunes

I hope you enjoyed reading this collection of uplifting addiction recovery quotes.

Stay victorious!