Edwin Muir Quotes

• We meet ourselves at every turn In the long country of the past.

  Edwin Muir

  Country, Past, Long

  Edwin Muir (1956). “One foot in Eden”

  7 Copy quote

• Packed in my skin from head to toe is one I know and do not know.

  Edwin Muir

  Knowledge, Skins, Toes

  Edwin Muir (1934). “Variations on a time theme”

  6 Copy quote

• The ancestral deed is thought and done,
  And in a million Edens fall
  A million Adams drowned in darkness,
  For small is great and great is small,
  And a blind seed all.

  Edwin Muir

  Fall, Eden, Darkness

  EDWIN MUIR (1960). “COLLECTED POEMS”

  11 Copy quote

• And without fear the lawless roads Ran wrong through all the land.

  Edwin Muir

  Law, Land, Ran

  'Journeys and Places' (1937) 'Hölderlin's Journey'

  14 Copy quote

• Kindness and courage can repair time's faults, And serving him breeds patience and courtesy In us, light sojourners and passing subjects.

  Edwin Muir

  Patience, Time, Kindness

  1949 The Labyrinth,'The Good Town'.

  11 Copy quote

• The life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man.

  Edwin Muir

  Men, Performances, Every Man

  1954 An Autobiography, ch.1.

  8 Copy quote

• I have observed in foolish awe
  The dateless mid-days of the law
  And seen indifferent justice done
  By everyone on everyone.

  Edwin Muir

  Law, Justice, Done

  EDWIN MUIR (1960). “COLLECTED POEMS”

  6 Copy quote

• There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runstime's deer is slain, And lies where it has lain.

  Edwin Muir

  Country, Time, Lying

  1937 'The Road'.

  8 Copy quote

• The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.

  Edwin Muir

  Mean, Mind, Literature

  1936 Scott and Scotland, introduction.

  9 Copy quote

• Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
  Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
  And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.

  Edwin Muir

  Lying, Thinking, Sorrow

  Edwin Muir, “The Horses”

  5 Copy quote

• Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.

  Edwin Muir

  Character, Reality, Literature

  54 Copy quote

• See him, the gentle Bible beast, / With lacquered hoofs and curling mane, / His wondering journey from the East / Half done, between the rock and plain.

  Edwin Muir

  Bible, Journey, Rocks

  EDWIN MUIR (1960). “COLLECTED POEMS”

  4 Copy quote

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