Maynard James Keenan Quotes

To me, music is emotion and if when you're listening to it and it doesn't make you feel that, then it's not music.

I don't believe in good music and bad music anymore. I'm through with that phase of my life. Sometimes I just wanna feel good, so I put on a good record. But mostly I'm more of a businessman than a music fan, so I'm listening to music in terms of, is this effective or not effective?

Some of us get a feeling when we hear music and we feel music, and you want to figure out how to continue to feel that.

Music is very abstract. When we talk about music, we're not discussing the music itself but rather how we react to it.

It's obvious some people don't have an emotional thing for the music.

I love how music can create an audiovisual experience. To me, some of the best music is the music that does that.

I guess I'm kind of a sucker for the emotion of music. I guess it's kind of odd, but it's the way I appreciate music. I present my stuff that way as well.

Like when I hear a beat, it might make you feel a way, but then it might make me feel a completely different way.

Telling someone about what a symbol means is like telling someone how music should make them feel.

Music sounds different to the one who plays it. It is the musician's curse.

When you start to analyze [rock 'n' roll], it's only because you don't understand it. You're just not connecting with it once you have to start analyzing it.

Music is an experience, not a science.

Music is meaningless noise unless it touches a receiving mind.

Science cannot tell us a word about why music delights us, of why and how an old song can move us to tears.

I love great music and if it doesn't move me I don't listen to it.

There is a field where all wonderful perfections of microscope and telescope fail, all exquisite niceties of weights and measures, as well as that which is behind them, the keen and driving power of the mind. No facts however indubitably detected, no effort of reason however magnificently maintained, can prove that Bach's music is beautiful.

People get out of music what they want to get out of it, and all I try to do is do the same thing.

I do not want [photography] explained to me in terms of... formulas, learned, but so hopelessly unsatisfying. I do not want my butterfly stuck on a pin and put in a glass case. I want to see the sunlight on its wings as it flits from flower to flower and I don't care a rap what its Latin name may be.

Other people singing my songs is something that I've never been casual about. I've always been very touched by it and I always go into immediate critical suspension.

Thus art is not an object, it is an experience.

The movie on the screen is always going to be different from the movie in your head. How it makes you feel is what I'm after, what I'm chasing, and what I'm trying to construct.

Music is everything that one listens to with the intention of listening to music.

I'm really passionate about music - I get really emotionally connected, probably in a weird way.

Poetry, she thought, wasn't written to be analyzed; it was meant to inspire without reason, to touch without understanding.

I don't want to tell what the songs are about for me, because then people can't decide for themselves, which is why I write; it's for you to find your own meaning in. For me it's my story, for someone else it's theirs; if I tell exactly what it means, then it's only my story.