Parenting & Family Quote by Itzhak Perlman

Perlman’s line lands with the offhand warmth of someone who’s spent a lifetime in rehearsal rooms where perfection is demanded and spontaneity is rationed. “Sometimes” does a lot of work: it signals experience, not sentimentality. Kids aren’t magically insightful on command; they’re intermittently brilliant because they don’t yet know which thoughts are supposed to stay unspoken. In a culture trained to polish every sentence into a brand-safe statement, the “mouth of kids” becomes a pressure-release valve - the one place where honesty still slips past the gatekeepers.

The phrasing is almost comically bodily, too: not “children’s wisdom,” but the mouth. Perlman is pointing to sound, to the raw fact of speech. That matters coming from a musician whose entire life is built around listening for what’s real inside a phrase. He’s praising not childhood innocence, but unedited perception - the kind that adults learn to replace with diplomacy, fear, or self-consciousness.

The context is easy to imagine: masterclasses, school visits, public Q&As where a child asks a question that slices through the usual reverence surrounding classical music. The subtext nudges adults as much as it celebrates kids: stop performing maturity. The “wonderful things” aren’t cute; they’re clarifying. They remind a virtuoso - and the rest of us - that art is not only technique and tradition, but the courage to say the simple true thing out loud.