Dennis was not a reflective man; perhaps he had never before meditated very deeply on the transitoriness of life, and the thousand ways in which oblivion is forever clutching at us, obliterating the few poor traces of our existence that are left when we depart from this world.
"True and Other Stories"
George Parsons Lathrop
When Napoleon expressed his surprise that she should have dared to make war on him with means so utterly inadequate, she at once retorted: "Sire, I must confess to Your Majesty, the glory of Frederick the Great had misled us as to our real strength"-a retort which justly won the praise of that fastidious connoisseur, Talleyrand, for its reminder of Prussia's former greatness and the transitoriness of all human grandeur.
"The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2)"
John Holland Rose
Here we are far from all vapid and artificial sentiment; we have philosophical meditation proceeding from the profoundest source of the pathos of human life, the transitoriness of man and his works.
"The Youth of Goethe"
Peter Hume Brown