Louise J. Kaplan Quotes - Page 2

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• By directing our sentiments, passions, and reason toward the common human plight, imagination grants us the advantages of a moralexistence. What we surrender of innocent love of self is exchanged for the safeties and pleasures of belonging to a larger whole. We are born dependent, but only imagination can bind our passions to other human beings.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Passion, Self, Safety

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

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• From the beginning moments of life, the urges for each of us to become a self in the world are there--in the liveliness of our innate growth energies, in the vitality of our stiffening-away muscles, in our looking eyes, our listening ears, our reaching-out hands.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Eye, Listening Ear

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

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• It is not speech or tool making that distinguishes us from other animals, it is imagination....Of what use are speech sounds and tools without an inspiration toward perfectibility, without a sense that we can create or construct a history.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Inspiration, Animal, Imagination

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• Young people...have more compassion and tenderness toward the elderly than most middle-aged adults. Nothing--not avarice, not pride, not scrupulousness, not impulsiveness--so disillusions a youth about her parents as the seemingly inhumane way they treat her grandparents.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Pride, Compassion, Elderly

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• Another potentiality of our irrepressible juvenility is a capacity to maintain until the onset of senility an active creative interaction with our environment. We persist in exploring, investigating, inventing, discovering. In these respects humans of all eras, in all societies, all ages of life, are more like baby chimps and not at all like the sedate and rigidly conforming adult chimpanzee, who hasn't changed much since she was five or six years old.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Baby, Years, Creative

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

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• 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

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• Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual destinies with the destiny of the species.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Destiny, Generations, Links

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

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• We humans undergo two major growth spurts: one during infancy and another from eleven to twelve until fifteen or sixteen--pubescence. Between the two is a relatively quiescent growth period in which most of the body takes a rest from growing while the brain continues to mature. This period of life is general referred to as childhood or, sometimes, latency.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Two, Childhood, Growth

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• Paradoxically, the toddler's "No" is also a preliminary to his saying yes. It is a sign that he is getting ready to convert his mother's restrictions and prohibitions into the rules for behavior that will belong to him.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Mother, Saying Yes, Toddler

  Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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• As he walks away on his own two feet--the toddler's body-mind has reached its moment of perfection. The world is his and he the mighty conqueror of all he beholds.... As long as mother sticks around in the wings, the mighty acrobat confidently performs his trick of twirling in circles, walking on tiptoe, jumping, climbing, staring, naming. He is joyous, filled with his grandeur and wondrous omnipotence.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Mother, Omnipotence, Circles

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• A man's fatherliness is enriched as much by his acceptance of his feminine and childlike strivings as it is by his memories of tender closeness with his own father. A man who has been able to accept tenderness from his father is able later in life to be tender with his own children.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Children, Memories, Father

  Louise J. Kaplan (1978). “Oneness and separateness: from infant to individual”, Touchstone

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• We belong to that order of mammals, the primates, distinguished by its propensity for repeated single litters, intense parental care, long life-spans, late sexual maturity, and a complex and extensive social existence... Our protracted biological and psychological helplessness, which extends well into the third year of life, intensifies the bond between infant and parents, making possible a sense of generational continuity. In contrast to other primates these bonds are not obliterated after sexual maturity.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Maturity, Order, Years

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

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• 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

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• 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

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• 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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• What eleven- to thirteen-year-old boys fear is passivity of any kind. When they do act passively we can be fairly certain that it is an act of aggression designed to torment a parent or teacher. . . . Mischief at best, violence at worst is the boy's proclamation of masculinity.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Teacher, Boys, Years

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

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