Erich Auerbach

“The sublime, the tragic, and the realistic are indissolubly connected.”

“The horizontal, that is the spatial and temporal connection of events, is dissolved; only the vertical, the connection of each event with the divine plan, which ordained it, holds.”

“Our philological home is the earth: it can no longer be the nation.”

“The new impulse which Christianity gave to history was the idea of a universal history of mankind.”

“In the Homeric poems, the sublime, the tragic, and the problematic are wanting.”

“Dante's work is a mixture of the sublime and the low, which is in direct contrast to the classical tradition.”