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

- 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 ea…

- 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 trainin…

- 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,…

- Hermann Ebbinghaus

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

- 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, na…

- Hermann Ebbinghaus

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

- Hermann Ebbinghaus

Sensorial perception, for example, certainly occurs with greater or less accuracy according to the degree of interest; it is constantly given other d…

- 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 ef…

- Hermann Ebbinghaus