Life & Wisdom Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Taste, for Goethe, is less a personal preference than a discipline with standards and consequences. “One cannot develop taste from what is of average quality but only from the very best” reads like a refinement of Enlightenment-era self-cultivation: you don’t become discerning by sampling the cultural equivalent of gruel. You train the palate on excellence, and excellence becomes the measuring stick that makes everything else legible.

The intent is quietly polemical. Goethe is pushing back against the comforting idea that “exposure” alone produces sophistication. Average work, in his view, doesn’t merely fail to elevate; it actively dulls perception by normalizing compromise. The subtext is almost physiological: taste is a muscle, and mediocre inputs atrophy it. Only exemplary art sharpens your ability to notice proportion, structure, restraint, daring - the things you can’t learn from work designed to offend no one.

Context matters. Goethe is writing from inside the project of German classicism, when “Bildung” (self-formation) was a moral and cultural agenda, not a lifestyle slogan. His world treated aesthetic judgment as linked to character: what you admire shapes what you tolerate, then what you imitate. That’s why he’s so absolutist. He’s not snob-posturing for sport; he’s arguing that standards are contagious, and so is their absence.

Read now, it doubles as a critique of algorithmic culture: the endless middle, optimized for retention, teaches you to accept the flat line as a horizon. Goethe’s prescription is bracingly elitist, but also practical: if you want sharper judgment, curate upward.