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“Human life. Duration: momentary. Nature: changeable. Perception: dim. Condition of Body: decaying. Soul: spinning around. Fortune: unpredictable. Lasting Fame: uncertain. Sum Up: The body and its parts are a river, the soul a dream and mist, life is warfare and a journey far from home, lasting reputation is oblivion.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“They who live in prosperity and have no experience of adversity know nothing of the state of their souls. In the first place, tribulation opens the eyes which prosperity had kept shut. St. Paul remained blind after Jesus Christ appeared to him and during his blindness he perceived the errors in which he lived. During his imprisonment in Babylon, King Manasseh had recourse to God, was convinced of the malice of his sins, and did penance for them. And after that he was in distress. He prayed to the Lord his God and did penance exceedingly before the God of his fathers. The Prodigal, when he found himself under the necessity of feeding swine and afflicted with hunger. exclaimed: "I will arise and go to my father.”
― St Alphonsus Liguori

“Jesus…could save us without dying on the Cross… a prayer offered to His Eternal Father would be… of infinite value. [It] would therefore be sufficient for the salvation of the world and of a thousand worlds. But what was sufficient for redemption was not sufficient for love.”
― St Alphonsus Liguori

“History without tradition has produced a historicism that relativized the development of Christian doctrine in such a way as to make the distinction between authentic growth and cancerous aberration seem completely arbitrary... Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
― Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600