Edward Thorndike Quotes

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

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

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

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.

Human beings are accustomed to think of intellect as the power of having and controlling ideas and of ability to learn as synonymous with ability to have ideas. But learning by having ideas is really one of the rare and isolated events in nature.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.