Quotes from Erich Auerbach

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

Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.

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.

It was Plato who bridged the gap between poetry and philosophy; for, in his work, appearance, despised by his Eleatic and Sophist predecessors, became a reflected image of perfection. He set poets the task of writing philosophically, not only in the sense of giving instruction, but in the sense of striving, by the imitation of appearance, to arrive at its true essence and to show its insufficiency measured by the beauty of the Idea.

Interpretation reached such proportions that the real vanished.

The Bible's claim to truth is not only far more urgent than Homer's, it is tyrannical—it excludes all other claims. The world of the Scripture stories is not satisfied with claiming to be a historically true reality—it insists that it is the only real world, is destined for autocracy.

human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them to give birth to themselves. —Gabriel García Márquez

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.

Vico, who looks at the whole of human history and says, "mind made all this

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 Auerbach who is most familiar today is defined by a certain time period: he is the scholar who fled Germany and who wrote under duress in impoverished conditions (most memorably, but least significantly, without a research library) and then later reflected on this tumultuous era, the Auerbach of "Figura" (1938), Mimesis (1946), and "The Philology of World Literature" (1952).

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.