Werner Herzog Quotes

As for the "anger" of the volcano, we leave it up to the local populations who create their demons, their gods and their divine punishment.

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.

Gods always behave like the people who make them.

One of the things I find exciting about Joan of Arc is how clearly the story of her life reveals the creation of myth, a process in which every one of us is involved - every one of us who tells stories and all those who listen, each informing the other.

One thing that I get from a lot of people with 'American Gods' is people saying that they would love some kind of glossary with a list of all the Gods and who they are, so that they can look them up.

The fable of a god or gods visiting the earth did not originate with Christianity

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted.

I still don't understand what a sea god would be doing in Atlanta." Leo snorted. "What's a wine god doing in Kansas? Gods are weird.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

The world of gods and spirits is truly 'nothing but' the collective unconscious inside me.

If we should take a million of worlds like this and number their particles, we should find that there are more Gods than there are particles of matter in those worlds.

The conception of gods originated in fear and curiosity. Primitive man, unable to understand the phenomena of nature, and harassed by them, saw in every terrifying manifestation some sinister force expressly directed against him; and as ignorance and fear are the parents of all superstition, the troubled fancy of primitive man wove the God idea.

A world like that, which exists only because the gods enjoy a joke, must be a place where magic can survive. And sex too, of course.

All ages before ours believed in gods in some form or other. Only an unparalleled impoverishment in symbolism could enable us to rediscover the gods as psychic factors, which is to say, as archetypes of the unconscious. No doubt this discovery is hardly credible as yet.

During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these gods in his own favour by means of magic and prayer.

And sing to those that hold the vital shears; And turn the adamantine spindle round, On which the fate of gods and men is wound.

Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes.... The only people who still call hurricanes acts of God are the people who write insurance forms.

I hate the moon. I hate tides and earthquakes and volcanoes. I hate a world where things that have absolutely nothing to do with me can destroy my life and the lives of people I love.

What gods are there, what gods have there ever been, that were not from man's imagination?

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.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

You can kill that man but not his song, When it's sung the whole world round...

Sacrifices have to be made if you want to make a dent in the world, and that's what I started out to do - to make a dent in pop culture.

We can redream this world and make the dream come real. Human beings are gods hidden from themselves.

[M]yths are not invented as stories are. Myths are inspired-they really are. They come from the same realm that dream comes from.