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Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.

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
Way
Mankind
Things
Friend
Life
Becomes
Happened
Best
Music
Ever
Introduced
Right
Classical

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I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
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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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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
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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.
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In performance, we have a greater purpose. The greater purpose is that we're communing together, and we want this moment to be really special for all of us. Because otherwise, why bother to have come at all? It's not about proving anything. It's about sharing something.
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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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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.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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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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.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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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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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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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.
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Perfection is not very communicative
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Practicing is not only playing your instrument, either by yourself or rehearsing with others - it also includes imagining yourself practicing. Your brain forms the same neural connections and muscle memory whether you are imagining the task or actually doing it.
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One is that you have to take time, lots of time, to let an idea grow from within. The second is that when you sign on to something, there will be issues of trust, deep trust, the way the members of a string quartet have to trust one another.
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