Quote

Once something is memorable, it's living and you're using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.

Yo-Yo Ma

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Using
Foundation
Creative
Society
Living
Something
Memorable

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
One of the things I love about music is live performance.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
As you begin to realize that every different type of music, everybody's individual music, has its own rhythm, life, language and heritage, you realize how life changes, and you learn how to be more open and adaptive to what is around us.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
Nobody else can make the sound you make.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Yo-Yo Ma