Louise J. Kaplan Quotes About Adolescence

Quotes about: Adolescence

• Adolescence is the conjugator of childhood and adulthood.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Teenager, Childhood, Adolescence

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• Children, even infants, are capable of sympathy. But only after adolescence are we capable of compassion.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Inspirational, Sympathy, Children

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• The most significant change wrought by adolescence is the taming of the ideals by which a person measures himself. . . . Love of oneself becomes love of the species. Conscience is pointed to the future, whispering permission to reach beyond the safety net of our ordinary and finite human existence.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Future, Significant Change, Safety

• Adolescence represents an inner emotional upheaval, a struggle between the eternal human wish to cling to the past and the equally powerful wish to get on with the future.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Powerful, Struggle, Past

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Passion, Past, Issues

• Another reason for the increased self-centeredness of an adolescent is her susceptibility to humiliation. This brazen, defiant creature is also something tender, raw, thin-skinned, poignantly vulnerable. Her entire sense of personal worth can be shattered by a frown. An innocuous clarification of facts can be heard as a monumental criticism.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Self, Criticism, Centeredness

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• When a child becomes an adult . . . the elders are fearful. And for good reason . . . not we but they are the germinators of future generations. Will they leave us behind as we did our parents? Consign us to neatly paved retirement villages? Trample us in the dust as they go flying out to their new galaxies? We had better tie them down, flagellate them, isolate them in the family cocoon, . . . indoctrinate them into the tribal laws and make sure they kneel before the power of the elders.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Retirement, Children, Dust

• It is an odd fact that what we now know of the mental and emotional life of infants surpasses what we comprehend about adolescents. . . . That they do not confide in us is hardly surprising. They use wise discretion in disguising themselves with the caricatures we design for them. And unfortunately for us, as for them, too often adolescents retain the caricatured personalities they had merely meant to try on for size.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Wise, Emotional, Design

• Adolescence is the time to enlarge the natural sentiments of pity, friendship, and generosity, the time to develop an understanding of human nature and the varieties of human character, the time to gain insight into the strengths and weaknesses of all men and to study the history of mankind.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Strength, Time, Character

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• Adolescence is a time of active deconstruction, construction, reconstruction--a period in which past, present, and future are rewoven and strung together on the threads of fantasies and wishes that do not necessarily follow the laws of linear chronology.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Future, Past, Law

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• Infancy is the realm conveyed to us in dreams which look backward to the past. Adolescence, more like a work of art, is a prospective symbol of personal synthesis and of the future of humankind. Like a work of art that sets us on the pathway to new discoveries, adolescence promotes new meanings by mobilizing energies that were initially invested in the past.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Dream, Art, Past

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

• During adolescence imagination is boundless. The urge toward self-perfection is at its peak. And with all their self- absorption and personalized dreams of glory, youth are in pursuit of something larger than personal passions, some values or ideals to which they might attach their imaginations.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Dream, Passion, Self

• Though they themselves might be as surprised as their parents and teachers to hear it said, adolescents--these poignantly thin- skinned and vulnerable, passionate and impulsive, starkly sexual and monstrously self-absorbed creatures--are, in fact, avid seekers of moral authenticity. They wish above all to achieve some realistic power over the real world in which they live while at the same time remaining true to their values and ideals.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Teacher, Real, Avid

• The adolescent frequently supposes that she is breaking out of the confines of her mundane, schoolgirl existence simply in order to break rules and defy authority. . . . She rids herself of the "oughts" and "musts" that convert every minor infraction into a sin of omission or commission. It certainly does not occur to her or to her family that by questioning the moral standards she erected as a child she is taking the first steps in her journey toward a firmer, more reasonable, less harsh, more ethical form of conscience.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Journey, Omission

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