Flabbergastededly Astonished

Astonish:  To surprise greatly; astound; flabbergast.

"These allergic types can never safely use alcohol in any form at all; and once having formed the habit and found they cannot break it, once having lost their self-confidence, their reliance upon things human, their problems pile up on them and become astonishingly difficult to solve."

Once you transform a cucumber into a pickle you have a pickle and that's what you have.  You will not have a cucumber to put on your salad tonight.  It's over, if you're alcoholic.  Play all the games you want, explore all the different avenues of drinking, self-justify, self-justify, self-justify, just know that it's over as far as the drinking being an appropriate solution is concerned.

"Men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol.

Uh, yeah, no shit?

These men were not drinking to escape; they were drinking to overcome a craving beyond their mental control."

It's important that I'm often reminded that alcohol is a fixative for me and not a source of pleasure.  This is astonishingly hard for normal people to understand, that the idea isn't to have fun but to escape discomfort, to go somewhere else, to be someone different.  "I liked to party," I told a guy once.  "Brother, you weren't partying - you were drinking," he said.  I didn't necessarily want to feel good - I wanted to feel different.

Courage:  The ability to do something that frightens one.

The frequent inability to give up minor habits by those who have given up alcohol is an excellent point.  By contrast the temptation is insignificant but because these habits are deemed to be insignificant, relatively so, no genuine sustained effort is put forth to suppress them.

The intellectual idea of abstinence is not of itself sufficient.  It takes sustained effort to unite the intellectual concept with that consistent form of action which is an expression of automatic attitude rather than a monument to will power.

Whatever may be the theoretical desire and intention, the old habits do not die as quickly or as easily as one might wish, nor are they dead and buried when one wishes them to be so.

The habits of year's standing are not going to quickly pass out of the picture no matter how diligent a man may be in his application  of the work.  He has to keep directing his mental processes in a formal and definitive manner for at least a year.