Werner Herzog: Likeness

Werner Herzog is German film director, producer, screenwriter, actor and opera director. Explore interesting quotes on likeness.
Werner Herzog: 106   quotes 7   likes

“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

Burden of Dreams (1982)
Context: Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.

Feeling

“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

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Idea

“Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)
Context: Your film is like your children. You might want a child with certain qualities, but you are never going to get the exact specification right. The film has a privilege to live its own life and develop its own character. To suppress this is dangerous. It is an approach that works the other way too: sometimes the footage has amazing qualities that you did not expect.

Life , Children

“We comprehend… that nuclear power is a real danger for mankind, that over-crowding of the planet is the greatest danger of all. We have understood that the destruction of the environment is another enormous danger. But I truly believe that the lack of adequate imagery is a danger of the same magnitude. It is as serious a defect as being without memory. What have we done to our images? What have we done to our embarrassed landscapes? I have said this before and will repeat it again as long as I am able to talk: if we do not develop adequate images we will die out like dinosaurs.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Memory

“Incredible. I didn't know how to calm him down, and then I had an inspiration. I went to my hut, where, for months I had hidden a piece of chocolate. We would almost have killed one another for something like that. I went back to him, going right into his face and ate the chocolate. All of a sudden he was quiet. This was utterly beyond him.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002), On Klaus Kinski

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

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Money

“To me, adventure is a concept that applies only to those men and women of earlier historical times, like the mediaeval knights who travelled into the unknown. The concept has degenerated constantly since then… I absolutely loathe adventurers, and I particularly hate this old pseudo-adventurism where the mountain climb becomes about confronting the extremes of humanity.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Women , Men , Hate , Travel

“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

About chickens, on the Signs of Life (1968) DVD audio commentary (2005).

Love , Stupidity , Animals

“If I abandon this project I would be a man without dreams and I don't want to live like that: I live my life or I end my life with this project.”

Werner Herzog

Said while making Fitzcarraldo
Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Life , Dreams

“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.”

Werner Herzog

Herzog on Herzog (2002)

Feeling

“As you see [filmmaking] makes me into a clown. And that happens to everyone — just look at Orson Welles or look at even people like Truffaut. They have become clowns.”

Werner Herzog

Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980)

People

“Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, we in comparison to that enormous articulation, we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle. It is not that I hate it, I love it, I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.”

Werner Herzog

Burden of Dreams (1982)

Hate , Star , Universe , Stupidity