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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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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This middle age thing is a little weird. Some friends and mentors are gone, and there's a very forward-looking new generation coming up behind me. So it's very much finding my own place.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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I play an instrument that has four strings, and I'm still trying to get it right. What I've tried to do in the process of playing these four strings is to try and understand the people I meet, the stories they have to tell. And then become an advocate for them and their stories through music.
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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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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.
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Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I'm sure of this I've always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.
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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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I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
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When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it.
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Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
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Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
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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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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 think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
Yo-Yo Ma