Edward Thorndike famous quotes

03-26-2025

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

#Wise #Fall #Color
Psychology is the science of the intellects, characters and behavior of animals including man.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Character #Men #Animal
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Mean #May #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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Men #Numbers
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Real #Men #Differences
Human folk are as a matter of fact eager to find intelligence in animals.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Matter #Facts
Nowhere more truly than in his mental capacities is man a part of nature.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Men #Capacity
Some statements concern the conscious states of the animal, what he is to himself as an inner life; others concern his original and acquired ways of response, his behavior, what he is an outside observer
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Way #Behavior
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Education #Character #Mean
All that exists, exists in some amount and can be measured.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Existence
So the animal finally performs in that situation only the fitting act.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Fitting #Situation
Psychology helps to measure the probability that an aim is attainable.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Psychology #Helping #Aim
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Nature #Thinking #Ideas
Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Art #Agriculture #Psychology
Dogs get lost hundreds of times and no one ever notices it or sends an account of it to a scientific magazine.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Dog #Magazines #Lost
The intellectual evolution of the race consists in an increase in the number, delicacy, complexity, permanence and speed of formation of such associations.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Race #Numbers #Intellectual
Amongst the minds of animals that of man leads, not as a demigod from another planet, but as a king from the same race.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Kings #Animal #Men
For origin and development of human faculty we must look to these processes of association in lower animals.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Association #Looks
He who learns and runs away, lives to learn another day.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Running #Military #Another Day
To the intelligent man with an interest in human nature it must often appear strange that so much of the energy of the scientific world has been spent on the study of the body and so little on the study of the mind.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Nature #Intelligent #Men
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Character #Animal #Psychology
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Facts #Mental Health
From the lowest animals of which we can affirm intelligence up to man this type of intellect is found.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Men #Type
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Animal #Thinking #Feelings
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.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Dog #Fashion #Hands
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
-- Edward Thorndike

#Character #Lasts #Study
It will of course, be understood that directly or indirectly, soon or late, every advance in the sciences of human nature will contribute to our success in controlling human nature and changing it to the advantage of the common wheel.
-- Edward Thorndike

#Nature #Wheels #Common

You may also like:

Abraham Maslow
Psychologist
Albert Bandura
Psychologist
Alfred Binet
Psychologist
B. F. Skinner
Psychologist
Carl Rogers
Psychologist
G. Stanley Hall
Psychologist
Hermann Ebbinghaus
Psychologist
Ivan Pavlov
Physiologist
Jean Piaget
Psychologist
Jerome Bruner
Psychologist
John B. Watson
Psychologist
John Dewey
Philosopher
Lev S. Vygotsky
Psychologist
Lewis Terman
Psychologist
Max Wertheimer
Psychologist
Noam Chomsky
Linguist
Sigmund Freud
Neurologist
Wilhelm Wundt
Psychologist
William James
Philosopher
Wolfgang Kohler
Psychologist