Top 314 Quotes & Sayings by Werner Herzog - Page 2

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.

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 am a product of my failures.

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

We live in an era when established values are no longer valid, when prodigious discoveries are being made every year, when catastrophes of unbelievable proportions occur weekly.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.

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

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.

Hold firm to your vision but don't be a tyrant on set.

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

I love nature but against my better judgment.

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 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.

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.

Facts do not constitute truth.

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

I like and I love everything that has to do with cinema, writing, directing, editing, creating music, and even acting.

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

Film is not analysis, it is the agitation of mind; cinema comes from the country fair and the circus, not from art and academicism.

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.

You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour.

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

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

It's not because nature is angry, it's rather that we are stupid. We're not doing the right thing with our planet.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Get used to the bear behind you.

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."

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

If you don’t have a deal in two days, you won’t have a deal in two years.

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

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.

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

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

I think Irish people started to move to the United States - many things that were of consequence. And it was a tiny and mild event compared to what had happened 74,000 years ago.

I have always postulated that we have to find a new way to deal with reality. It's not so much facts that interest me, but a deeper truth in them - an ecstasy of truth, an ecstatic truth that illuminates us. That's what I've been after.

If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it!

You better make yourself acquainted to what the requirements are, what the value of money is all about and how you create a long-term survival, and in many cases it has to do with how you handle finances.

I simply don't like the culture of drugs. I never liked the hippies for it. I think it was a mistake to be all the time stoned and on weed. It didn't look right and it doesn't look right today either and the damage drugs have done to civilizations are too enormous. And besides, I don't need any drug to step out of myself. I don't want them and I do not need them.

Clive [Oppenheimer] and I figured out that I'm the only one probably in the film industry who is clinically sane. I say that as a joke, but there's a grain of truth to it. I'm not a stupid daredevil who jumps into the crater of the volcano to get the closest close-up, I'm not one of those. And you have to be aware that you have a crew with you and you are responsible.

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.