Werner Herzog Quotes

I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

People think we had a love-hate relationship. Well, I did not love him, nor did I hate him. We had mutual respect for each other, even as we both planned each other's murder.

I know for sure that there is only one step from insecticide to genocide.

Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.

Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read...if you don't read, you will never be a filmmaker.

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.

Money doesn't make films. You just do it and take the initiative.

Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.

What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.

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.

At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.

I have not seen a film as powerful, surreal, and frightening in at least a decade unprecedented in the history of cinema.

I would travel down to Hell and wrestle a film away from the devil if it was necessary.

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.

You are confronted with abysses of time that are, in a way, unfathomable. You see a painting in charcoal of raindeer 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Public life is constantly aware of the volcano.

Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.

I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.

Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are.

English is a really wonderful language and I urge you all to investigate it

I see planets that don't exist and landscapes that have only been dreamed.

Chauvet Cave is rather like the awakening of the modern human soul or I would say the awakening of modern human culture. Because Neanderthal men who still rode the landscape parallel to the people who did these paintings didn't have culture. There's no evidence of culture, no symbolic depiction, no evidence of music, no evidence of sculptures, no evidence of religious beliefs.

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."

You should bear in mind that almost all my documentaries are feature films in disguise.

I am torn between the beauty of the natural world, which you see all around us, and the idea that some dumb tornado could blow a telephone pole onto my sweet Camaro.

Every man should pull a boat over a mountain once in his life.

Spirit of immersion and curiosity and awe and participation is something which Timothy Treadwell and I have in common.

When we speak about trespassing, we speak about artistic trespassing. You have to be prudent and have common sense and a sense of responsibility when you're trespassing. I think you haven't seen a film on volcanoes like that before. It's not National Geographic. It is wildly imaginative and very poetic and has a sense of awe that you normally do not see in films.

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.

One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.

Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.

In the Chauvet Cave, there is a painting of a bison embracing the lower part of a naked female body. Why does Pablo Picasso, who had no knowledge of the Chauvet Cave, use exactly the same motif in his series of drawings of the Minotaur and the woman? Very, very strange.

I travel without barely any luggage. Just a second set of underwear and binoculars and a map and a toothbrush.

"Jack Reacher" was easy because the function of the villain was just to spread fear and horror.

I never planned my career in steps. It's all coming at me like burglars in the night.

Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

[Tim White] always spoke about his work in terms of forensics, as if he was investigating a crime scene. While we were there, they found the fossilized excrement of a lion that had turned into stone, and we would immediately start to concoct stories. Was it a lion that killed the early human? Of course, the lion could've been there three weeks later, or maybe 20,000 years earlier.

I do whatever pushes me hardest. It's coming at me and I try to... it's like uninvited guest and I have to wrestle them out the door or through the window - get them out and get over with them quickly.

It is not only my dreams, my belief is that all these dreams are yours as well. The only distinction between me and you is that I can articulate them. And that is what poetry or painting or literature or filmmaking is all about... and it is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are. We have to articulate ourselves, otherwise we would be cows in the field.

I despise formal restaurants. I find all of that formality to be very base and vile. I would much rather eat potato chips on the sidewalk.

You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.

It was a subject [ volcanoes] that was dormant in me for a long time and it popped up 40 years ago when I made a [short] film on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe about a volcano that was about to explode and a single farmer refused to leave ["La Soufrière"].

I always loved celluloid cameras in the early days that were sturdy and reliable. Even under tropical conditions and downpour of rain, it would still work.