Hermann Ebbinghaus

What is true is alas not new, the new not true.

— Hermann Ebbinghaus

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

— 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.

— 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

— 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.

— Hermann Ebbinghaus

The constant flux and caprice of mental events do not admit of the establishment of stable experimental conditions.

— 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.

— Hermann Ebbinghaus

The schoolboy doesn't force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that he must impress them again in the morning.

— 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.

— Hermann Ebbinghaus

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

— 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. 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

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

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.

— Hermann Ebbinghaus

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

— 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.

— Hermann Ebbinghaus