Werner Herzog
Reuters

The British Film Institute (BFI) is today (22 August) celebrating what it has dubbed Werner Herzog day, a celebration of the famed German director, by hosting an event at London record store Rough Trade East.

Herzog is best known for films such as Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn, Into The Abyss and Abel Ferrara remake The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

In celebration of the man's many talents, the BFI has delved into the use of animals and nature within his films. We on the other hand have collected 10 of his greatest, funniest, darkest quotes.

- "We have to articulate ourselves. Otherwise we would be cows in the field."

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

- "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."

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

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

- "What would an ocean be without a monster lurking in the dark? It would be like sleep without dreams."

- "Do you not then hear this horrible scream all around you that people usually call silence?"

- "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."

- "Facts do not convey truth. That's a mistake. Facts create norms, but truth creates illumination."

- "I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony; but chaos, hostility and murder."

- "Read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read, read..."

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

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

- "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."

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