Hermann Ebbinghaus quotes

Hermann Ebbinghaus was a German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory. His research led to the discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He made significant contributions to our understanding of cognitive processes in learning. Here are 30 of his quotes:

Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject. (Hermann Ebbinghaus)
A poem is learned by heart and then not again repeated. We will suppose that after a half year it has been forgotten: no effort of recollection is able to call it back again into consciousness. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The constant flux and caprice of mental events do not admit of the establishment of stable experimental conditions. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The school-boy doesn't force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that be must impress them again in the morning. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The relation of repetitions for learning and for repeating English stanzas needs no amplification. These were learned by heart on the first day with less than half of the repetitions necessary for the shortest of the syllable series. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Ideas which have been developed simultaneously or in immediate succession in the same mind mutually reproduce each other, and do this with greater ease in the direction of the original succession and with a certainty proportional to the frequency with which they were together. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The musician writes for the orchestra what his inner voice sings to him; the painter rarely relies without disadvantage solely upon the images which his inner eye presents to him; nature gives him his forms, study governs his combinations of them. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Often, even after years, mental states once present in consciousness return to it with apparent spontaneity and without any act of the will; that is, they are reproduced involuntarily. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Natural science served as - if we overlook the hasty identification of mind and matter which had its origin in natural science - as a shining and fruitful example to psychology. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Psychology has a long past, but only a short history. (Hermann Ebbinghaus)
No matter how thoroughly a person may have learned the Greek alphabet, he will never be in a condition to repeat it backwards without further training. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Meanwhile the fact that the connection with the activity of memory in ordinary life is for the moment lost is of less importance than the reverse, namely, that this connection with the complications and fluctuations of life is necessarily still a too close one. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
On the basis of the familiar experience that that which is learned with difficulty is better retained, it would have been safe to prophesy such an effect from the greater number of repetitions. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Series of syllables which have been learned by heart, forgotten, and learned anew must be similar as to their inner conditions at the times when they can be recited. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
What is true is alas not new, the new not true. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
One needs but to say that, in the case of an unfamiliar sequence of syllables, only about seven can be grasped in one act, but that with frequent repetition and gradually increasing familiarity with the series this capacity of consciousness may be increased. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Mental states of every kind, - sensations, feelings, ideas, - which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The amount of detailed information which an individual has at his command and his theoretical elaborations of the same are mutually dependent; they grow in and through each other. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other directions by the change of external stimuli and by ideas. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Psychology has a long past, yet its real history is short. For thousands of years it has existed and has been growing older; but in the earlier part of this period it cannot boast of any continuous progress toward a riper and richer development. In the fourth century before our era that giant thinker, Aristotle, built it up into an edifice comparing very favorably with any other science of that time. But this edifice stood without undergoing any noteworthy changes or extensions, well into the eighteenth or even the nineteenth century. Only in recent times do we find an advance, at first slow but later increasing in rapidity, in the development of psychology. (Hermann Ebbinghaus)
When we read how one mediæval saint stood erect in his cell for a week without sleep or food, merely chewing a plantain-leaf out of humility, so as not to be too perfect; how another remained all night up to his neck in a pond that was freezing over; and how others still performed for the glory of God feats no less tasking to their energies, we are inclined to think, that, with the gods of yore, the men, too, have departed, and that the earth is handed over to a race whose will has become as feeble as its faith. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
The foreseeing of our attention is the will to give attention, is voluntary attention. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Popular thought, supported by desires common to all human beings, readily accepts the view that mind is essentially different from matter, that its laws are in every respect different from the laws of material nature, and that the brain, being a part of the material nature, is simply the special tool used by the mind in its intercourse with nature. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Mental states of every kind - sensations, feelings, images- which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it - have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist. Although the inwardly - turned look may no longer be able to find them, nevertheless they have not been utterly destroyed and annulled, but in a certain manner they, continue to exist, stored up to speak, in the memory. View quote
Hermann Ebbinghaus