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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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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Understand
Preserve
Culture
Heritage
Order
Preserves
Ends
Poet
Must
Taught
Love
Community
World
Common
Conserve
Learn
Cultures

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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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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
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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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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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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.
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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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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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