Maynard James Keenan Quotes

Imperfections define perfection

To me, that ugliness, that grotesqueness - that's the essence [of life]. That's where you realize, it's not about all the consonance and the harmony. It's all the parts that are wrong that help explain why we're drawn to something - what the mystery is - just as much as the beautiful things.

When I first heard Bjork's music, I felt like I was a similar-minded thinker, both harmonically and melodically. She takes those things that you naturally assume to be opposite because they're presented that way most of the time, and the way she twines them together is so beautiful. To be able to do that is so powerful.

I want to fuse the abrasive and the beautiful.

Dissonance is the truth about harmony.

I am inspired by so much. I am inspired by women, of course - beautiful women. I am also inspired by not so beautiful things in the world.

If it hadn't been what it was, it would've been beautiful.

It's the flaw that brings out the beauty.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

She was beautiful, but she was beautiful in the way a forest fire was beautiful.

For something to be beautiful it doesn’t have to be pretty.

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

Beauty is not a means, not a way of furthering a thing in the world. It is a result; it belongs to ordering, to form, to aftereffect.

It has amazed me that the most incongruous traits should exist in the same person and, for all that, yield a plausible harmony.

It is the stretched soul that makes music, and souls are stretched by the pull of opposites-opposite bents, tastes, yearnings, loyalties. Where there is no polarity-where energies flow smoothly in one direction-there will be much doing but no music.

Your thorns are the best part of you.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

I embrace the messiness of life. I find it so beautiful actually.

I've been lucky to have a beautiful wife and children. The idea that something so beautiful can be so horrific at the same time. Beauty is a complex thing.

A certain type of perfection can only be realized through a limitless accumulation of the imperfect.

All the masterpieces of art contain both light and shadow. A happy life is not one filled with only sunshine, but one which uses both light and shadow to produce beauty.

Some days seem to fit together like a stained glass window. A hundred little pieces of different color and mood that, when combined, create a complete picture.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

The business of the poet and the novelist is to show the sorriness underlying the grandest things and the grandeur underlying the sorriest things.

Nothing keeps me in such awe as perfect beauty; now, there is something consoling and encouraging in ugliness.