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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.

Yo-Yo Ma

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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Fit
Growing
Wish
Understand
Remember
Great
World

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.
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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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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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Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.
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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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I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It's one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth.
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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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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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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
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Music has always been transnational.
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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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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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The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.
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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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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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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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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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