Top 120 Werner Herzog Quotes (2024 Update)

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

— Werner Herzog

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization, Quotes About Ocean

2. “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder.”

— Werner Herzog

3. “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

4. “Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence.”

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

6. “Tourism is a mortal sin.”

— Werner Herzog

7. “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

8. “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.”

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

10. “May I propose a Herzog dictum? those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.”

— Werner Herzog

11. “If you don’t read, you will never be a filmmaker.”

— Werner Herzog

12. “Get used to the bear behind you.”

— Werner Herzog

13. “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

14. “Sometimes bad luck hits you like in an ancient Greek tragedy, and it’s not your own making. When you have a plane crash, it’s not your fault.”

— Werner Herzog

15. “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

16. “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

17. “I think psychology and self-reflection is one of the major catastrophes of the twentieth century.”

— Werner Herzog

18. “I think it is a quest of literature throughout the ages to describe the human condition.”

— Werner Herzog

19. “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

20. “Academia is the death of cinema. It is the very opposite of passion. Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates.”

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

22. “I prefer to be alive, so I’m cautious about taking risks.”

— Werner Herzog

23. “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

24. “I love nature, but against my better judgment.”

— Werner Herzog

25. “I discover no kinship, no understanding, no mercy. I see only the overwhelming indifference of nature.”

— Werner Herzog

26. “For me a true landscape is not just a representation of a desert or a forest. It shows an inner state of mind, literally inner landscapes, and it is the human soul that is visible through the landscapes presented in my films.”

— Werner Herzog

27. “I’m not into the culture of complaint. I roll up my sleeves and somehow I get it together.”

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

30. “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

31. “We live in a society that has no adequate images anymore, and if we do not find adequate images and an adequate language for our civilization with which to express them, we will die out like the dinosaurs.”

— Werner Herzog

32. “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”

— Werner Herzog

33. “I am fascinated by the idea that our civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness.”

— Werner Herzog

34. “I think there should be holy war against yoga classes.”

— Werner Herzog

35. “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

36. “We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.”

— Werner Herzog

37. “Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.”

— Werner Herzog

38. “When you look at the paintings at Chauvet Cave, they’re not primitive or like children’s little scribbles, it bursts on the scene fully accomplished and when you look through the faces of cultural history, art history, it has never gotten any better.”

— Werner Herzog

39. “Friendship is possible with mice.”

— Werner Herzog

40. “I am someone who takes everything very literally. I simply do not understand irony, a defect I have had ever since I was able to think independently.”

— Werner Herzog

41. “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.”

— Werner Herzog

42. “I have a great map of the Tibesti Mountains in the southern Sahara or Northern Chad. It’s a dream of mine to go there, but it’s such a volatile area, you have to be prudent.”

— Werner Herzog

43. “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

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

— Werner Herzog

45. “If I had to climb into hell and wrestle the devil himself for one of my films, I would do it.”

— Werner Herzog

46. “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

47. “I do not believe in the Cinema verite. Sometimes a really good lie is better than any truth.”

— Werner Herzog

48. “The danger is to stupidly believe that depicting facts gives us much insight. If facts were the only thing that counted, the telephone directory would be the book of books.”

— Werner Herzog

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

— Werner Herzog

50. “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