“Experiences that we remember intrusively, despite desperately wanting to banish them from our minds, are closely linked to, and sometimes threaten, our perceptions of who we are and who we would like to be.”

“Truth is in our blood. It is the essennce of our being. It is the best part of us, the core of what makes us human. It is our soul, our fundamental genetic beauty, and our spirit. We were created perfect, and despite the inevitability that we loose some of that perfection when we mature and develop in the midst of others who are wounded, we always retain the capacity to become perfect once again. The soul may be buried deeply, but as long as our hearts beat there remains hope.”

“If we can educate our desires in the right way, we will become ‘what we want to become and what our Father in Heaven would want us to become. It begins by careful contemplation of who we are and what we want in life.”

“I learned to look more upon the bright side of my condition, and less upon the dark side, and to consider what I enjoyed, rather than what I wanted : and this gave me sometimes such secret comforts, that I cannot express them ; and which I take notice of here, to put those discontented people in mind of it, who cannot enjoy comfortably what God has given them, because they see and covet something that he has not given them. All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”

“The Savior’s was a life of service. When we serve our neighbor, we help those who are in need. In the process we may find solutions to our own difficulties. As we emulate the Savior, we show our love to our Heavenly Father and His Son, Jesus Christ, and we become more like Them.”

“All our discontents about what we want appeared to me to spring from the want of thankfulness for what we have.”

“But if it is true that human minds are themselves to a very great degree the creations of memes, then we cannot sustain the polarity of vision we considered earlier; it cannot be "memes versus us," because earlier infestations of memes have already played a major role in determining who or what we are. The "independent" mind struggling to protect itself from alien and dangerous memes is a myth. There is a persisting tension between the biological imperative of our genes on the one hand and the cultural imperatives of our memes on the other, but we would be foolish to "side with" our genes; that would be to commit the most egregious error of pop sociobiology. Besides, as we have already noted, what makes us special is that we, alone among species, can rise above the imperatives of our genes— thanks to the lifting cranes of our memes.”