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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.

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
Something
Memorable
Using
Foundation
Creative
Society
Living

More quotes by 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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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Perfection is not very communicative
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
Yo-Yo Ma
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You must have a reason to be in the places to which you go, and you must do only things that you really care about.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children's education.
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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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
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Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma