Hermann Ebbinghaus Quotes (16 quotes) | Quotes of famous people

Hermann Ebbinghaus: 16 quotes 1 like

Famous Hermann Ebbinghaus Quotes

“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

Source: Psychology: An elementary textbook, 1908, p. 3: Partly cited in: Edwin Boring (1929) A History of Experimental Psychology p. ix

“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.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 8

“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.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 85

“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.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Psychology: An elementary textbook, 1908, p. 6; Partly cited in: Peter Ashworth, ‎Man Cheung Chung (2007) Phenomenology and Psychological Science, p. 54.

“Mental events, it is said, are not passive happenings but the acts of a subject.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 91

“The foreseeing of our attention is the will to give attention, is voluntary attention.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Psychology: An elementary textbook, 1908, p. 91

Hermann Ebbinghaus Quotes about time

“Language is a system of conventional signs that can be voluntarily produced at any time.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Hermann Ebbinghaus, quoted in: Geza Revesz, The Origins and Prehistory of Language, London 1956. footnote p. 126

“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. But if he chances to set out purposely to learn it backwards, he will probably accomplish this in noticeably shorter time than was the case in the previous learning in the customary order.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 113

“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.”

Hermann Ebbinghaus

Source: Memory: A contribution to experimental psychology, 1885, p. 1; Cited in: Richard F. Thompson, Stephen A. Madigan (2013) Memory: The Key to Consciousness, p. 87