Hermann Ebbinghaus Quotes

Humans more easily remember or learn items when they are studied a few times over a long period of time (spaced presentation), rather than studied repeatedly in a short period of time.

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.

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.

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

Psychology has a long past, but only a short history.

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

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.

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.

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.

What is true [in psychology] is alas not new, the new not true.

The school-boy doesnt force himself to learn his vocabularies and rules altogether at night, but knows that be must impress them again in the morning.

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.

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.