Parenting & Family Quote by Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

Goethe’s line flatters the obvious and then quietly indicts the sophisticated. If you want the taste of cherries and strawberries, he suggests, don’t consult the cultivated adult palate with its rehearsed adjectives and status anxiety; go to children and birds, the two groups least invested in sounding interesting. The wit is in the inversion: the “experts” are the worst witnesses, because they’ve learned to translate sensation into performance.

The intent isn’t childishness-as-virtue so much as perception-as-risk. Children respond before interpretation hardens into habit. Birds don’t describe; they choose. Both are governed by appetite and immediacy, which makes them reliable barometers of pleasure. Goethe, a writer obsessed with lived experience and the limits of rational systems, is needling the Enlightenment impulse to turn everything into an account, a taxonomy, a proof. Taste is the perfect battleground: intimate, bodily, resistant to grand theory.

Subtextually, the line carries a warning for art, too. The “taste” of a poem or a painting can’t be fully retrieved through criticism or secondhand summaries; you have to watch who moves toward it without being bribed by reputation. That doesn’t mean anti-intellectualism. It’s a reminder that interpretation should come after contact, not instead of it.

Context matters: Goethe wrote across an era when German Romanticism pushed back against dry rationalism, elevating nature, intuition, and direct encounter. Children and birds become his compact alliance against the adult world’s overexplained life.