110+ Werner Herzog Quotes (Visionary, Intense And Quirky)

Werner Herzog is a German filmmaker, actor, and opera director. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential directors in the history of cinema, and is known for his unconventional and often surrealistic films. His work often deals with themes such as dreams, death, and the absurd, and has been described as "poetic, mesmerizing, and utterly insane".

Top 10 Werner Herzog Quotes

1. I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder.
2. I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.
3. 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.
4. Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film.
5. Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination.
6. What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams.
7. At the same time, there's something magnificent about volcanoes; they created the atmosphere that we need for breathing.
8. 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.
9. Public life is constantly aware of the volcano.
10. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.

Werner Herzog Short Quotes

• I shouldn't make movies anymore. I should go to a lunatic asylum.
• Facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
• You will learn more by walking from Canada to Guatemala than you will ever learn in film school.
• I never planned my career in steps. It's all coming at me like burglars in the night.
• If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!
• I love nature but against my better judgment.
• Tourism is a mortal sin.
• Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
• Strangely enough, there's this mythology sprouting out that I cannot stop.
• The collapse of the stellar universe will occur - like creation - in grandiose splendor.

Werner Herzog Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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. — 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

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. — Werner Herzog

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. — 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

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

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

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. — 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

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. — Werner Herzog

Coincidences always happen if you keep your mind open, while storyboards remain the instruments of cowards who do not trust in their own imagination and who are slaves of a matrix If you get used to planning your shots based solely on aesthetics, you are never that far from kitsch. — 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

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"]. — Werner Herzog

When you look at my film you see footage that is unbelievably awesome and beautiful and dangerous looking. It's something that is very, very cinematic. — Werner Herzog

For a film I shot on the most difficult mountain on God's wide earth in Patagonia for a sequence where there was high probability some digital effects were needed, somebody made storyboards and I quickly ignored them, after half an hour I ignored them and I never used any digital effect. — Werner Herzog

Everyone who makes films has to be an athlete to a certain degree because cinema does not come from abstract academic thinking; it comes from your knees and thighs. — Werner Herzog

I'm very, very curious about how people live under the volcano, how they handle the permanence of danger. — Werner Herzog

It's curiosity, and always a sense of poetry. You see it in particular in the chapter "Iceland" where I'm reciting ancient Icelandic poetry. It has this very beautiful gravitas in conjunction with the volcanoes. — Werner Herzog

In Germany, you would be hanged if you cracked a joke about Hitler and you would be killed by the state if you were insane in a project of euthanasia. — 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

I doubt that VR will really replace the quality of books. If you want to go into let's say the Prado in Madrid and you want to go into Hieronymus Bosch or whatever, you'd rather go into books and you take your time and it's sitting there all day long and you go back and revisit it and it becomes part of your physical life. — Werner Herzog

Well they are very frightening for me because their stupidity is so flat. You look into the eyes of a chicken and you lose yourself in a completely flat, frightening stupidity. They are like a great metaphor for me... I kind of love chicken, but they frighten me more than any other animal. — Werner Herzog

Ten years ago in Antarctica shooting "Encounters at the End of the World," I met a very fine volcanologist from Cambridge University [Clive Oppenheimer] and we kept talking about doing a film and all of a sudden it became serious when he hinted at the possibility to film in North Korea. — Werner Herzog

It's funny how in the long time of me working in various countries and various situations that there is this kind of idea out in the media that I am a daredevil and that I risk the lives of everyone around me, but nobody ever gets hurt on my shoot. Some crew members sometimes, but the actors are OK. — Werner Herzog

For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory. — Werner Herzog

However, there are a couple of volcanoes very close nearby, like Vesuvius in Italy right next to Naples. — Werner Herzog

If you truly love film, I think the healthiest thing to do is not read books on the subject. I prefer the glossy film magazines with their big color photos and gossip columns, or the National Enquirer. Such vulgarity is healthy and safe. — Werner Herzog

I make films because I have not learned anything else and I know I can do it to a certain degree. 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. — Werner Herzog

I am so used to plunging into the unknown that any other surroundings and form of existence strike me as exotic and unsuitable for human beings. — Werner Herzog

There are certainly laws and elements that make a film more accessible to mainstream audiences. If you've got Tom Cruise as a strongman, I'm sure it would have larger audiences, but it wouldn't have the same substance. — Werner Herzog

Along with this rapid growth of forms of communication at our disposal - be it fax, phone, email, internet or whatever - human solitude will increase in direct proportion. — Werner Herzog

If you go to Florence, it has all surface beauty, but like Venice, it's simply a museum of Renaissance times. Los Angeles is raw, uncouth and bizarre, but it's a place of substance. It has more new horizons than any other place. — 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 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

When the camera is looking back at our planet Earth, it's the tiniest of specks somewhere out there in the universe. So we do have a new sense of proportion. Of course the volcanoes and the magma under us just remind us of that. — Werner Herzog

There's a completely new culture out there. I'm not a participant of texting and driving - or texting at all - but I see there's something going on in civilization which is coming with great vehemence at us. — Werner Herzog

All of a sudden it's twelve-year-olds who are contacting me, fifteen-year-olds, and they have very, very fascinating questions. However, they speak in a language of their age group which I have to learn first. — Werner Herzog

I don't care whether the person is guilty or not guilty. It's not my business to establish guilt or innocence. It's a court of law that does that and a jury does that, but not me. — Werner Herzog

[This kind of strange mythology about me.] I've pulled a huge steamboat over a mountain; I've done a feature film with all the actors acting under hypnosis - things that are very unusual. — Werner Herzog

There are certain ways, narrative forms, that do not function as a continuation, for example, of 3D movies. You see, what is obvious to me is virtual reality or immersive 360 degrees virtual reality is not somehow a part of 3D movies, and it is not a new form of video games, it's neither, it is something completely new, something different, and nobody has come up yet with real convincing content. — Werner Herzog

You must live life in its very elementary forms. The Mexicans have a very nice word for it: pura vida. It doesn't mean just purity of life, but the raw, stark-naked quality of life. And that's what makes young people more into a filmmaker than academia. — Werner Herzog

At the end [when I speak about] magma under us everywhere, how it's monumentally indifferent to scurrying roaches, recoiled reptiles, and vapid humans alike. You see, you would never hear anything like that in a National Geographic or a PBS movie. This is clearly a transgression when it comes to being politically correct with your commentary. — Werner Herzog

I'm one of the few reading and thinking people who loves Las Vegas for the vulgarity and omnipresence of the dream. The collective dream. There's something enormous about it. Let me say one thing: Las Vegas and cinema have similar roots. The country fair. The magician at the country fair. The vulgarity of the country fair. — Werner Herzog

I have worked for YouTube like texting and driving because I was curious to test what's out there and how does it function, can I release something like about texting and driving to very young audiences, at the age where they do their drivers test? And the response was phenomenal, millions of people saw it. — Werner Herzog

I went to volcanoes where I knew that there was a lot of mythology around them; there was something like the creation of gods and monsters and demons. — Werner Herzog

The paintings are not just on flat walls - you have these enormous niches, bulges and protrusions, as well as stalactites and stalagmites. The effect of the three-dimensionality is phenomenal. It's a real drama which the artists of the time understood, and they used it for the drama of their paintings. — Werner Herzog

I live my life outside of the glitz and glamour of the red carpet events, and so you’ll never see me there. I’m never at parties. — Werner Herzog

It's very strange, for example, in North Korea where the volcano at the Chinese border is some sort of the mythical birthplace of the Korean people. — Werner Herzog

I think there should be holy war against yoga classes. — 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

For example, how you would introduce a leading character into your film, and as an absolute ingenious example, [Elia] Kazan in his film Viva Zapata!, how he introduces his leading character Marlon Brando into the film. No film ever did it as wonderful as he did it. — Werner Herzog

I'm a very circumspect and prudent person, and I eliminate danger as far as it can be done. — Werner Herzog

I think I would be a good villain in a James Bond movie. — Werner Herzog

I don't dabble, I'm good at acting. — Werner Herzog

Orson Welles, one of the best of the best. One of the strongest. As strong as an animal. He somehow was pushed out of the business because he would spend the entire budget of the film before he had even done half the pre-production. — Werner Herzog

Roger Ebert was a very valiant soldier of cinema who passed away, and we miss him. It's over with serious discourse about cinema in the print media and on television. It has been replaced by celebrity news. So we are speaking in his spirit always. — Werner Herzog

I wouldn't like to travel at all. I've been too much around. — Werner Herzog

We do not see the danger clearly enough that we develop images adequate to our state of civilization. When you watch TV, you know instantly that there's something wrong with the images. When you open a magazine and see the ads, you know there's something wrong with the images. And it's unhealthy and not good and outright dangerous, in my opinion. — Werner Herzog

Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence. — Werner Herzog

I'm not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together. — Werner Herzog

The opinion of the public is sacred. The director is a cook who merely offers different dishes to them and has no right to insist they react in a particular way. A film is just a projection of light, completed only when it crosses the gaze of the audience[...] — Werner Herzog

Well, it had to be about the stories and the people who live under the volcano, what kind of new gods do they create? What sort of demons? And of course North Korea falls clearly into this category since the socialist revolution at the end of the Second World War. Somehow they adopted the myth of the power and dynamics of their volcano. — Werner Herzog

The deal was we had to have people accompanying us and they would ask us not to film something [in North Korea]. For example, we wanted to film at a certain place and there happened to be a building under construction and it didn't look as fancy as the other buildings, so they wanted us to shoot where everything looked finished and made a good impression of the cityscape. — Werner Herzog

The wonderful thing is that Clive [Oppenheimer ] insisted on training his camera - his private camera - on me at one point. We were discussing things such as how to avoid certain dangers, while reflecting on a volcano that had threatened to explode 40 years ago. — Werner Herzog

James Joyce is a cul-de-sac. [Ulysses is] ... an example how literature branched out and went into, lost itself in nowhere, no man's land. — Werner Herzog

I must say, the people who started this whole Masterclass series have been very helpful and very intelligent to point out certain things and also give me some guidance, "isn't there something missing, shouldn't we address this or that?" so it's not completely alone out of the blue. It's very well thought through. — Werner Herzog

My non-fiction films are pretty much fiction, or at least close... It's all "movies" for me. I never have searched for a subject. They always just come along. They never come by way of decision-making. They just haunt me. I can't get rid of them. I did not invite them. — Werner Herzog

Nature is monumentally indifferent. — Werner Herzog

I always felt completely confident - it's like in a feature film, knowing your principle character is extremely well-cast. I had that same confidence in Clive [Oppenheimer]. — Werner Herzog

We are surrounded by worn-out, banal, useless and exhausted images, limping and dragging themselves behind the rest of our cultural evolution. — Werner Herzog

Otherwise you have to repeat a lot when you're filming. And I've seen the film and it's in a border town in Mexico close to the border with the United States, so of course you have a lot of traffic and noise and dogs barking right nearby, and for that you have to repeat a lot and Robert Rodriguez didn't do that. Smart, smart, smart, you better have smarts also. — Werner Herzog

I think I'm a prudent filmmaker. — Werner Herzog

Fragility of modern world leaves me with the idea we'd better anticipate what's going on. We take our right steps today and now. And we'd better avoid, that we are overdependent on, let's say, the internet. — Werner Herzog

There is never an excuse not to finish a film. — Werner Herzog

When I film, there are no emotions. That would be the last thing. — Werner Herzog

I think I would be a good villain in a James Bond movie. They were fairly weak, the last half-dozen of villains in James Bond movies were not that convincing. — Werner Herzog

I wouldn't make a connection between the daily news and volcanoes. — Werner Herzog

If you want to propose marriage to your girlfriend and you live in England and she is in Sicily, do the decent thing and walk down there. Travelling by car or aeroplane wouldn't be right at such a moment. — Werner Herzog

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. — Werner Herzog

I am somebody who creates images, with my perspectives, fascinations and my instincts as a narrator. You have to activate the audience's imagination. If you are just giving them scientific results, they would forget the film in five minutes flat. — Werner Herzog

It is something more fleeting than what you normally see. People might somehow take it into their own dreams, into their own life, in a way. I hear it more recently; people are telling me that when they leave the theater and see one of my films, they are not alone anymore. It's probably more that kind of feeling. If I managed to do a film like that, everything is fine. — Werner Herzog

I do other sorts of things. I act in other people's movies. I direct operas. I write books. — 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

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

Everything you see in North Korea, it's all propaganda, but it's all connected to the volcano. — Werner Herzog

Of course, as a German, I wouldn't like to tell the American people how to handle their criminal justice. — Werner Herzog

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

I have been in lots of very intense life situations. I have been shot at, and I have been hungry, and I have been in solitude, and I have also briefly been behind bars. So in a way, I know the heart of men. — Werner Herzog

Life Lessons by Werner Herzog

1. Werner Herzog teaches us to never give up on our dreams and to always strive to reach our goals, no matter how difficult the journey may be.
2. He also encourages us to embrace the unknown and to take risks in order to achieve success.
3. Lastly, Herzog emphasizes the importance of having a strong work ethic and dedication to our craft in order to achieve our goals.