10 Quotes by Erich Auerbach

The way in which we view human life and society is the same whether we are concerned with things of the past or things of the present.

The old man, of whom we know how he has become what he is, is more of an individual than the young man; for it is only in the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality.

To write history is so difficult that most historians are forced to make concessions to the technique of legende.

The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us—they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.

The Scripture stories do not, like Homer’s, court our favor, they do not flatter us that they may please us and enchant us – they seek to subject us, and if we refuse to be subjected we are rebels.

It is only during the course of an eventful life that men are differentiated into full individuality.

Interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished.

The writers of Scripture enter into the random everyday depths of popular life, taking seriously whatever is encountered there, clinging to the concrete and refusing to systematize experience in concepts.

The effect, to be sure, is precisely that which they describe, and is, furthermore, the actual source of the conception of epic which they themselves hold, and with them all writers decisively influenced by classical antiquity. But the true cause of the impression of “retardation” appears to me to lie elsewhere – namely, in the need of the Homeric style to leave nothing which it mentions half in darkness and unexternalized.