Quote

Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward if you go forward, you have to jump together.

Yo-Yo Ma

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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Forward
Backwards
Faith
Jump
Fall
Leap
Together
Edge
Reason
Edges
Many
Ultimately
Things
Apart
Threaten
Reasons
Backward

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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The tradition of classical music and the opera is such that it used to be the place where social intercourse could take place between all parts of society: politicians, industrialists, artists, citizens, etc. That tradition, I think, still exists, but it's much, much more diluted.
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence.
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I really would like to be involved in things and to understand things, and in some ways you've got to be careful what you wish for because I feel very, very blessed to have such an interesting life and to be able to have little snapshots of lives of people from many different parts of the world.
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I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
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I don't always have a five-year plan. One thing you must do in life is keep your learning curve as high as possible.
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I learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
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My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.
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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.
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I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.
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There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
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