To be an artist at all is ...

To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
To be an artist at all is like living in Switzerland during a world war. To be an artist in Zurich, in 1917, implies a degree of self-absorption that would have glazed over the eyes of Narcissus.
 Tom Stoppard

More phrases

Courage - a perfect sensibility of the measure of danger, and a mental willingness to endure it.
 William Tecumseh Sherman
Feeling, in the broad sense of whatever is felt in any way, as sensory stimulus or inward tension, pain, emotion or intent, is the mark of mentality.
 Susanne Katherina Langer
In that period, we had the Cold War mentality imbued through us - the Post-war [environment] and the Cold War. I think we were reflecting some of that. This was before the Wall collapsed, etc.
 Stephen Mallinder
The kind of group mentality that we had lived under since the Second World War is starting to erupt, and the craving for individualism is now much stronger. It's not as taboo anymore, as it was when I was younger.
 Nicolas Winding Refn
I come out of a Cold War sensibility, a Cold War mentality, and during those Cold War years, I used to know, I thought, the answers to everything. And since the end of the Cold War, I'm just a dumb as everyone else.
 Jules Feiffer

Quotes from the same author

From as long as, literally as far back as I can remember I've liked puns, word jokes, I can literally recall looking at a comic at the age of six or seven and I remember what I enjoyed and what it was precisely and how the joke worked.
 Tom Stoppard
As a playwright, you can cover a lot of waterfront without being able to hold your own against an expert in any of those areas. I have no illusions about that.
 Tom Stoppard
The House of Lords, an illusion to which I have never been able to subscribe - responsibility without power, the prerogative of the eunuch throughout the ages.
 Tom Stoppard
Dying is not romantic, and death is not a game which will soon be over... Death is not anything... death is not... It's the absence of presence, nothing more... the endless time of never coming back... a gap you can't see, and when the wind blows through it, it makes not sound.
 Tom Stoppard
Beauty is desired in order that it may be befouled; not for its own sake, but for the joy brought by the certainty of profaning it.
 Tom Stoppard