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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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Yo-Yo Ma
Age: 68
Born: 1955
Born: October 7
Actor
Cellist
Composer
Music Pedagogue
Musician
Paris
France
Yo Yo Ma
YoYo Ma
Shorthand
Achieve
Ways
Understand
Music
Kind
Way

More quotes by 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.
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With every year of playing, you want to relax one more muscle. Why? Because the more tense you are, the less you can hear.
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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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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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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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Things can fall apart, or threaten to, for many reasons, and then there's got to be a leap of faith. Ultimately, when you're at the edge, you have to go forward or backward if you go forward, you have to jump together.
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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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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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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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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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The thing that I've always been slightly frustrated with, was that the idea of a CD is kind of confined to a material possession that you can put on a shelf. And the idea of music, for me, is always about both the communication and the sharing of content. And so the interactive part is missing.
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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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I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world.
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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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Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
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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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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.
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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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