Maynard James Keenan Quotes

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history.

I was not religious, but I liked rituals. I liked the idea of connecting an action with remembering.

Anyone who doesn't feel the crosses simply doesn't get that country.

We sing these songs for the everyday occasions of life, and they are very close to the hearts of our people.

I do love the idea of ritual.

Music is like church to me. It's as spiritual a connection as I just about ever make.

Ceremony and ritual are like a warm, fuzzy coat to the Brits. It feels good to put it on.

I don’t think we can separate art from overall human dignity and hope.

In music the mystical element is definitely there all the time, and one can see it.

The sexual act - separating that from love itself - is centered solely in the body, whereas spirituality is connected to the whole self. Whether it's a female, a taste, or a sound, all these beautiful things affect our self. We are the perceivers of beauty, and that's why sex doesn't quite go far enough. You can go much further with the spiritual.

Music is one of the closest link-ups with God that we can probably experience. I think it's a common vibrating tone of the musical notes that holds all life together.

Ritual is the most primitive reflection of serious thought, a slow deposit, as it were, of people's imaginative insight into life.

Vertical attention is not the same as, and doesn't evolve from nor imply, hierarchy. We could say that hierarchy is associated with power, and vertical attention with longing for the Divine Feminine, for the Divine Masculine, for what the Sufis call 'wine.'

I'm good at doing the laundry. At least that. And it's a religious experience...Water, earth, fire-polarities of wet and dry, hot and cold, dirty and clean. The great cycles-round and round-beginning and end-Alpha and Omega, amen.

We gather at night to celebrate being human. Sometimes we call out low to the tambourine. Fish drink the sea, but the sea does not get smaller! We eat the clouds and evening light. We are slaves tasting the royal wine.

The stone that was rolled before Christ's tomb might appropriately be called the philosopher's stone because its removal gave not only the pharisees but, now for 1800 years, the philosophers so much to think about.

I have said that Texas is a state of mind, but I think it is more than that. It is a mystique closely approximating a religion.

You think religion is what's inside a little building filled with pretty lights from stained glass windows. But it's not. It's wings! Wings!

I therefore think that I was right in trying from the outset of the Olympic revival to rekindle a religious awareness.

Prayers without wine are perfectly pointless.

I think that sex, drugs, art and religion very much overlap with one another and sometimes one becomes another.

You need music, I don't know why. It's probably one of those Joe Campbell questions, why we need ritual. We need magic, and bliss, and power, myth, and celebration and religion in our lives, and music is a good way to encapsulate a lot of it.

We keep thinking of deity as a kind of fact, somewhere; God as a fact. God is simply our own notion of something that is symbolic of transcendence and mystery. The mystery is what’s important.

Magic has always been an element of Witchcraft, but in the Craft its techniques were practiced within a context of community and connection.

A religious belief is not a statement about Reality, but a hint, a clue about something that is a mystery, beyond the grasp of human thought. In short, a religious belief is only a finger pointing to the moon. Some religious people never get beyond the study of the finger. Others are engaged in sucking it. Others yet use the finger to gouge their eyes out. These are the bigots whom religion has made blind. Rare indeed is the religionist who is sufficiently detached from the finger to see what it is indicating - these are those who, having gone beyond belief, are taken for blasphemers.