Werner Herzog is a German film director, screenwriter, writer, actor, and opera director. Herzog is considered a figure of the New German Cinema. His films often feature ambitious protagonists with impossible dreams, people with unique talents in obscure fields, or individuals who are in conflict with nature. These Werner Herzog quotes will motivate you.
Best Werner Herzog Quotes
- “I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “The trees are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain. …Taking a close look at what’s around us, there is some sort of harmony: it’s the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Look into the eyes of a chicken and you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Facts do not convey truth. That’s a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“Nature is monumentally indifferent.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read…if you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Money doesn’t make films. You just do it and take the initiative.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I’m trying to find these rare moments where you feel completely illuminated. Facts never illuminate you. The phone directory of Manhattan doesn’t illuminate you, although it has factually correct entries, millions of them. But these rare moments of illumination that you find when you read a great poem, you instantly know. You instantly feel this spark of illumination. You are almost stepping outside of yourself and you see something sublime.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of reindeer and it was left unfinished and somebody else finished it. But through radio carbon dating we know that the next one completed the painting 5,000 years later. You’re just blown away by the notion of passage of time. We have no relationship to that kind of depth of time.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “For a moment the feeling crept over me that my work, my vision, is going to destroy me, and for a fleeting moment I let myself take a long, hard look at myself, something I would not otherwise do–out of instinct, on principle, out of self-preservation–look at myself with objective curiosity to see whether my vision has not destroyed me already. I found it comforting to note that I was still breathing.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“I am a product of my failures.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly. In ancient Greek the word “chaos” means “gaping void” or “yawning emptiness.” The most effective response to the chaos in our lives is the creation of new forms of literature, music, poetry, art and cinema.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I never planned my career in steps. It’s all coming at me like burglars in the night.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world and those who watch television lose it.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“We have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Martin Luther was asked, what would you do if tomorrow the world would come to an end, and he said, ‘I would plant an apple tree today.’ This is a real good answer. I would start shooting a movie.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I love nature but against my better judgment.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I do not want to have a cell phone. I do not want it for cultural reasons. I do not want to be available all the time. I want to have time to think and to touch somebody, and have a meal across my kitchen table without a cell phone, being constantly on tweets.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I have never been one of those who cares about happiness. Happiness is a strange notion. I am just not made for it. It has never been a goal of mine; I do not think in those terms.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “In the face of the obscene, explicit malice of the jungle, which lacks only dinosaurs as punctuation, I feel like a half-finished, poorly expressed sentence in a cheap novel.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Facts do not constitute truth.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I see planets that don’t exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “While you are walking you would learn much more about filmmaking than if you were in a classroom. During your voyage you will learn more about what your future holds than in five years at film school. Your experiences would be the very opposite of academic knowledge, for academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Without dreams we would be cows in a field, and I don’t want to live like that. I live my life or I end my life with this project.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“I shouldn’t make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I try to be after something that is deeply reverberating inside of our souls, some deep echo from – even from prehistory. What makes us humans? How do we communicate? Where are we going at this moment? Something for an audience where they can step outside of themselves, where they can be almost like in ecstasy of truth, some sort of deep illumination. And that’s what I’m trying in documentaries and in feature films.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “If you do not have an absolutely clear vision of something, where you can follow the light to the end of the tunnel, then it doesn’t matter whether you’re bold or cowardly, or whether you’re stupid or intelligent. Doesn’t get you anywhere.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “It’s not because nature is angry, it’s rather that we are stupid. We’re not doing the right thing with our planet.” ~ Werner Herzog , Werner Herzog quotes on nature
- “I think the worst that can happen in filmmaking is if you’re working with a storyboard. That kills all intuition, all fantasy, all creativity.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “The universe couldn’t care less about us. I say this very clearly in the film [ “Into the Inferno”]: our planet is “indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles and vapid humans alike.”” ~ Werner Herzog
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“English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I’m not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “When I say tourism is sin and traveling on foot is virtue, it’s condensed into a dictum. It’s much more complex than that, but let’s face it, for me, my experience, the world reveals itself to those that travel on foot. You understand the world in a much deeper level. And it does good to anyone who makes film.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Ambition is to be the fastest runner on this planet, to be the first on the South Pole, which is a grotesque perversion of ambition. It’s an ego trip, and I’m not on an ego trip. I don’t have ambitions – I have a vision.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “For example, the face of Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert and she is the most beautiful goddess on screen that you can find anywhere around in the world. There’s no imperfections, and yet I don’t need to know every single pore in her face.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I have learned a lot through defeats, and, until today, it’s – I’m still haunted by defeats, and they do happen. Sometimes, a film of mine is rejected. And how do you deal with it? And you have to learn how to deal with it and survive anyway.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “A fairly young, intelligent-looking man with long hair asked me whether filming or being filmed could do harm, whether it could destroy a person. In my heart the answer was yes, but I said no.” ~ Werner Herzog
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“Hold firm to your vision but don’t be a tyrant on set.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “You have to be very prudent with what you are doing and what sort of tools you are utilizing. Drones have become a wonderful new tool in filmmaking.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “Of course, as a German, I wouldn’t like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “If you don’t have a deal in two days, you won’t have a deal in two years.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema, writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “If an actor knows how to milk a cow, I always know it will not be difficult to be in business with him.” ~ Werner Herzog
- “You can’t have a helicopter fly over boiling lava. It would’ve exploded from the heat, and is just way too dangerous. The pilot of a helicopter would’ve flatly refused anyway.” ~ Werner Herzog
