Top 80 Maynard James Keenan Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “We are eternal. All this pain is an illusion.”

— Maynard James Keenan

2. “Life is too short not to create something with every breath we draw.”

— Maynard James Keenan

3. “The trick is to use the drugs once to get there, and maybe spend the next ten years trying to get back there without the drug.”

— Maynard James Keenan

4. “Finding beauty in the dissonance.”

— Maynard James Keenan

5. “Recognize this as a holy gift and celebrate this chance to be alive and breathing.”

— Maynard James Keenan

6. “Liar, lawyer, mirror show me. What’s the difference?”

— Maynard James Keenan

7. “This sort of behavior is left to the psychotic, dogmatic, fundamentalist believers you see on your TV everyday letting off bombs and killing people in the name of God. Beliefs are dangerous. Beliefs allow the mind to stop functioning. A non-functioning mind is clinically dead. Believe in nothing.”

— Maynard James Keenan

8. “A circle is the reflection of eternity. It has no beginning and it has no end – and if you put several circles over each other, then you get a spiral.”

— Maynard James Keenan

9. “Music is about listening, the more you play, the more the magic spreads.”

— Maynard James Keenan

10. “I can’t be a legend yet. I’m not dead.”

— Maynard James Keenan

11. “Just in general, any government throughout history hasn’t really wanted its people to be educated, because then they couldn’t control them as easily.”

— Maynard James Keenan

12. “If you want to get your soul to heaven, trust in me. Don’t judge or question. You are broken now, but faith can heal you. Just do everything I tell you to do.”

— Maynard James Keenan

13. “Sure, I love fairy tales.”

— Maynard James Keenan

14. “I’m a pessimist. But I’m a pessimist with a sense of responsibility.”

— Maynard James Keenan

15. “People have to follow their hearts, and if their hearts lead them to Wal-Mart, so be it.”

— Maynard James Keenan

16. “Choices always were a problem for you. What you need is someone strong to guide you. Deaf and blind and dumb and born to follow, what you need is someone strong to use you – like me.”

— Maynard James Keenan

Featured in: Strong Quotes

17. “Desert, in generally, is a very good place to find yourself. Or lose yourself.”

— Maynard James Keenan

18. “Reading is more of a left-brain process, and listening to music is a right-brain function.”

— Maynard James Keenan

19. “Once you take yourself too seriously the art will suffer.”

— Maynard James Keenan

20. “For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn’t matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.”

— Maynard James Keenan

21. “Because as an only child, you have your own little world.”

— Maynard James Keenan

22. “Prescott National Forest is right on the edge of my home in Arizona.”

— Maynard James Keenan

23. “Why did Father give these humans free will? Now they’re all confused.”

— Maynard James Keenan

24. “I think there’s a reason why wine figures into so many religions. There’s something transcendent about it. It’s sort of the way that music is more than the sum of its parts. You have all these elements that make up the terroir that wine can communicate.”

— Maynard James Keenan

25. “It’s a purging of sorts. Like, when you’re all done doing your laundry and it’s fresh and bright, but washing the clothes, you wouldn’t want to get in while it’s spinning around.”

— Maynard James Keenan

26. “Every now and then, you get people who tend to forget what this country is about, which is a melting pot of races and cultures and freedom of speech.”

— Maynard James Keenan

27. “And if you don’t live, you have nothing to write about.”

— Maynard James Keenan

28. “But I’m a hot-blooded Italian by nature. Whatever the situation you present, I’m going to make something out of it.”

— Maynard James Keenan

29. “Because artists can be extremely eccentric and insane, and unfortunately, the people they hurt the most are the people that are closest to them.”

— Maynard James Keenan

30. “If you take different mythologies from different cultures, the names may change and the story lines may vary but there is always something in common.”

— Maynard James Keenan

31. “Everything we release with Tool is inspired by our music.”

— Maynard James Keenan

32. “One of the challenges we set up for ‘Puscifer’ was to come up with a core identity and see how far we can push it.”

— Maynard James Keenan

33. “There were a lot of choices to make and I always picked artist. I never once picked doctor, lawyer, firemen or something like that. It was always artist.”

— Maynard James Keenan

35. “I think the Grammys are nothing more than some gigantic promotional machine for the music industry. They cater to a low intellect and they feed the masses. They don’t honor the arts or the artist for what he created. It’s the music business celebrating itself.”

— Maynard James Keenan

36. “Most religious stories and mythologies have some sort of similar root, some sort of global archetypes.”

— Maynard James Keenan

37. “But you know, I’m the negative-Nancy, curmudgeon, glass-half-empty-with-a-leak-in-it guy – which is basically the fuel that fires me up anyway. Without that, we wouldn’t have me.”

— Maynard James Keenan

38. “I believe that music is a force in itself. It is there and it needs an outlet, a medium. In a way, we are just the medium.”

— Maynard James Keenan

39. “All I can do is say I smell a rat. I don’t know where it is or what kind of rat it is, but as an artist, I can express how. But I couldn’t responsibly stand up and tell people which way to go, because then I’m just as guilty as the people who are telling everybody else what to do and where to go.”

— Maynard James Keenan

40. “The idea is, if I can’t heal from my art, then how can you heal?”

— Maynard James Keenan

41. “I’m not an educated man. I only know what I’m told, and I’m not told that much; I have no frame of reference for how to place things in history be a responsible leader. All I can do is be an artist.”

— Maynard James Keenan

42. “It’s in my blood. My great-grandfather made wine and it’s a tradition I want to pass on to my son.”

— Maynard James Keenan

43. “The army influences everything I do. Certainly it teaches you discipline, which is a necessary element of development. I think there’s more of a collaborative understanding in the band because of that.”

— Maynard James Keenan

44. “I think the biggest problem working with me would be that I’m an only child, and so I have an internal dialogue that goes on that I just assume you can hear.”

— Maynard James Keenan

45. “I think the media made Manson, turned him into some larger than life figure and surrounded him with mystery and some shady glamour.”

— Maynard James Keenan

46. “I’ve always had an affinity for growing things.”

— Maynard James Keenan

47. “You know, I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell.”

— Maynard James Keenan

48. “If the education of our kids comes from radio, television, newspapers – if that’s where they get most of their knowledge from, and not from the schools, then the powers that be are definitely in charge, because they own all those outlets.”

— Maynard James Keenan

49. “I feel like with music there’s so much ego rooted in expressing your thoughts and your experiences with it.”

— Maynard James Keenan

50. “I see a lot of patterns in our behavior as a nation that parallel a lot of other historical processes.”

— Maynard James Keenan