Helene Deutsch Quotes

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.

What laughter is to childhood, sex is to adolescence.

Teens are passionate, questioning, curious, have a bit of the idealism I still cling to, and they're making decisions for the first time that can alter the course of their lives - and sometimes, the course of the world.

I've gone through several cycles. When I was little, I was the cute kid with missing teeth and funny one-liners. Then I moved on to be the young guy who wanted to be a grownup.

Other people have suggested that I write about teens because I'm perpetually stuck in that stage of my own development. That could very well be true. I would throw out that teens and tweens are just absolutely fabulous and the most interesting people on the planet. And it is a time of high drama, and everything matters.

L'adolescence est le seul temps o u' l'on ait appris quelque chose. Adolescence is the only time when we can learn something.

When you're younger, you're more selfish, because there's so much self-exploration, you're in your own mind.

The langour of Youth - how unique and quintessential it is! How quickly, how irrecoverably, lost! The zest, the generous affections, the illusions, the despair, all the traditional attributes of Youth - all save this come and go with us through life...These things are a part of life itself; but languor - the relaxation of yet unwearied sinews, the mind sequestered and self-regarding, the sun standing still in the heavens and the earth throbbing to our own pulse - that belongs to Youth alone and dies with it.

Adolescence is when the very worst and best impulses in the human soul struggle against each other for possession.

Teens are strange and magical.

It was tough because I was on the road so much, on top of everything. I went through what every girl goes through emotionally in life, going through high school. It wasn't easy.

I feel like we're always learning about ourselves, but at twelve, you're learning big things that shape your identity.

I was very immature - who isn't at age 12? Let's be real. Once I kind of figured myself out and grew as a person, I now have a ton of different friends and learned who I was.

I was definitely a late bloomer and didn't really come into my own until I was probably in my 20s.

High school is really when I came into my own.

I boxed until I got interested in other things. My first car. Girls.

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.

When we're growing up and being teenagers, oftentimes you try so hard to define yourself. You try to create an image of yourself because you don't really know who you are yet. And that can be kind of limiting because you forget that there are actually so many different sides of identity. And it's important to recognize that everyone is completely different.

I'm passionate about transformation.

The search for a personal identity is the life task of a teenager.

Adolescence is that time when I think, it can be- it's the cruelest place on Earth. It can really be heartless.

And when she started becoming a “young lady,” and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn’t fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really liked a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.

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.

The young are always in extremes.

Adolescence is the period of the decisive last battle fought before maturity. The ego must achieve independence, the old emotional ties must be cast off, the new ones created.