Edward Thorndike Quotes

Colors fade, temples crumble, empires fall, but wise words endure.

Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.

Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.

Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man.

Human education is concerned with certain changes in the intellects, characters and behavior of men, its problems being roughly included under these four topics: Aims, materials, means and methods.

All that exists, exists in some amount and can be measured.

He who learns and runs away, lives to learn another day.

Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.

The dog, on the other hand, has few or no ideas because his brain acts in coarse fashion and because there are few connections with each single process.

The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.

So the animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act.

When, instead of merely associating some act with some situation in the animal way, we think the situation out, we have a set of particular feelings of its elements.

Whatever exists at all exists in some amount. To know it thoroughly involves knowing its quantity as well as its quality.

Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.

This growth in the number, speed of formation, permanence, delicacy and complexity of associations possible for an animal reaches its acme in the case of man.

Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine.

Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.

The function of intellect is to provide a means of modifying our reactions to the circumstances of life, so that we may secure pleasure, the symptom of welfare.

For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.

On the whole, the psychological work of the last quarter of the nineteenth century emphasized the study of consciousness to the neglect of the total life of intellect and character

The un-conscious distortion of the facts is almost harmless compared to the unconscious neglect of an animal's mental life until it verges on the unusual and marvelous.

The restriction of studies of human intellect and character to studies of conscious states was not without influence on a scientific studies of animal psychology.

The real difference between a man's scientific judgments about himself and the judgment of others about him is he has added sources of knowledge.

From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.