Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied, if the stuff is getting stale, if the shelf isn't right, or if the offerings aren't right, it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.

O God, O God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Life without any wonder left in it is flat and stale.

A little while ago I was able to wander in a beautiful sublime fantasy world, in Ossian's half-dark magical world. But the blessed dreams dissolve; they seem like love potions - they intoxicate, exalt and then disappear, that is the misery and wretchedness of all our feelings. With thoughts it is no better: one easily overthinks things to the point of staleness.

The pity of it was that this discovery, if such it was, now seemed so stale, so profitless to me. What good was it? What good did thinking ever do?

What is in mind is a sort of Chautauqua...that's the only name I can think of for it...like the traveling tent-show Chautauquas that used to move across America, this America, the one that we are now in, an old-time series of popular talks intended to edify and entertain, improve the mind and bring culture and enlightenment to the ears and thoughts of the hearer. The Chautauquas were pushed aside by faster-paced radio, movies and TV, and it seems to me the change was not entirely an improvement. Perhaps because of these changes the stream of national consciousness moves faster now, and is broader, but it seems to run less deep. The old channels cannot contain it and in its search for new ones there seems to be growing havoc and destruction along its banks. In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for.

If conversation was the lyrics, laughter was the music, making time spent together a melody that could be replayed over and over without getting stale.

Southern political personalities like sweet corn travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows.

What nature delivers to us is never stale. Because what nature creates has eternity in it.

What's important at the grocery store is just as important in engines or medical systems. If the customer isn't satisfied if the stuff is getting stale if the shelf isn't right or if the offerings aren't right it's the same thing. You manage it like a small organization. You don't get hung up on zeros.

O God O God how weary stale flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!

Contrary to popular opinion things don't go stale particularly fast in the art world.

I don't think any movie or any book or any work of art can solve the stalemate in the Middle East today. But it's certainly worth a try.