What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul
Source: The Spectator, no. 215 (1711)
Topic
Browning asks what more is needed than being alive — the sheer fact of it as a reason for the heart and soul and senses to engage. Nerval finds a soul blossoming in every flower. Jerrold: religion is in the heart, not the knees. Maugham insists every artistic production should be the expression of a soul's adventure. Donne connects souls through letters more surely than presence does. Chesterton on the middle-aged discovery that the soul survives its youthful crises — and that this survival is the beginning of wisdom. The collection does not require religious belief to make sense: it uses soul in the older sense of the deepest thing a person has, the part that persists through experience and loss.
What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the soul
I count life just a stuff to try the soul's strength on
A man should have the fine point of his soul taken off to become fit for this world
Flowers are the sweetest things God ever made and forgot to put a soul into.
Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: