Werner Herzog quotes

Civilization is like a thin layer of ice upon a deep ocean of chaos and darkness. (Werner Herzog)
Film is not the art of scholars, but of illiterates. View quote
Werner Herzog
You can fight a rumour only with an even wilder rumour. View quote
Werner Herzog
Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. View quote
Werner Herzog
If you want to do a film, steal a camera, steal raw stock, sneak into a lab and do it! View quote
Werner Herzog
I like to direct landscapes just as I like to direct actors and animals. View quote
Werner Herzog
Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. View quote
Werner Herzog
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. View quote
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. View quote
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. View quote
Werner Herzog
There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. (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. View quote
Werner Herzog
We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile. View quote
Werner Herzog
I am not an artist and never have been. Rather I am like a craftsman and feel very close to the mediaeval artisans who produced their work anonymously and who, along with their apprentices, had a true feeling for the physical materials they were working with. View quote
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. View quote
Werner Herzog
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. View quote
Werner Herzog
I believe the common denominator of the Universe is not harmony, but chaos, hostility and murder. View quote
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. View quote
Werner Herzog
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. View quote
Werner Herzog
Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts. View quote
Werner Herzog
It is my duty because this might be the inner chronicle of what we are, and we have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field. (Werner Herzog)
Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: "You can´t legislate stupidity." View quote
Werner Herzog
Someone like Jean-Luc Godard is for me intellectual counterfeit money when compared to a good kung fu film. View quote
Werner Herzog
If you switch on television it's just ridiculous and its destructive. It kills us. And talk shows will kill us. They kill our language. So we have to declare holy war against what we see every single day on television. Commercials and - I think there should be real war against commercials, real war against talk shows, real war against "Bonanza" and "Rawhide", or all these things. View quote
Werner Herzog
Together, I said, we shall boil fire and stop fish. View quote
Werner Herzog