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
Reason
Edges
Many
Ultimately
Things
Apart
Threaten
Reasons
Backward
Forward
Backwards
Faith
Jump
Fall
Leap
Together
Edge

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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A Senegalese poet said 'In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.' We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.
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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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When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
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Music has always been transnational people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.
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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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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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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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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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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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When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
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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 think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
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