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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: 69
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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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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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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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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As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.
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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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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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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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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 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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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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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
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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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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.
Yo-Yo Ma
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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 don't always have a five-year plan. One thing you must do in life is keep your learning curve as high as possible.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
Yo-Yo Ma