“Almost all men improve on acquaintance.”
André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship
Source: The Martyrdom of Man (1872), Chapter IV, "Intellect"
“Almost all men improve on acquaintance.”
André Maurois (1885–1967) French writer
Un Art de Vivre (The Art of Living) (1939), The Art of Friendship
Marie Curie (1867–1934) French-Polish physicist and chemist
Pierre Curie (1923), as translated by Charlotte Kellogg and Vernon Lyman Kellogg, p. 168
“Men are anxious to improve their circumstances, but are unwilling to improve themselves.”
James Allen book As a Man Thinketh
Source: As a Man Thinketh
Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French Enlightenment philosopher and encyclopædist
Article on Encyclopedia, as translated in The Many Faces of Philosophy : Reflections from Plato to Arendt (2001), "Diderot", p. 237
L'Encyclopédie (1751-1766)
Jerry Coyne book Faith vs. Fact: Why Science and Religion are Incompatible
We do not need those hypotheses.
Source: Faith vs. Fact (2015), p. 257
George Long (1800–1879) English classical scholar
An Old Man's Thoughts on Many Things, Of Education I
“There's only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self.”
Aldous Huxley book Time Must Have a Stop
Time Must Have a Stop (1944)
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …
"The Nearest Star" (1989) (reprinted in The Secret of the Universe (1992), p. 82)
General sources
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël (1766–1817) Swiss author
The Influence of Literature upon Society (De la littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les istitutions sociales, 1800) , Pt. 2, ch. 4
Context: The evil arising from mental improvement can be corrected only by a still further progress in that very improvement. Either morality is a fable, or the more enlightened we are, the more attached to it we become.