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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.

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
Realized
Late
Passion
Music
Life
People
Twin
Twins
Passions

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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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Perfection is not very communicative
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Music has always been transnational.
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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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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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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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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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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
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Children, in a way, are constant learners. Certainly sponge-like. Absorbing everything without careful analysis, even though, at the same time, they are certainly capable of incredible insights.
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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What came up at age 49 is I realized that of all the things I'm interested in, the thing I'm most interested in is figuring out what makes people tick, why people think the way they do, why they act the way they do. And I realized that music is such a great way to investigate why people do what they do.
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I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
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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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I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.
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You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.
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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
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