Quote

Perfection is not very communicative

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
Communicative
Perfection

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

Image
You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year's answer might not do for another.
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
When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you're passionate about something, then you're more willing to take risks.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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
Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
I think the purpose of a piece of music is significant when it actually lives in somebody else. A composer puts down a code, and a performer can activate the code in somebody else. Once it lives in somebody else, it can live in others as well.
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
Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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
Image
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.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
Yo-Yo Ma
Image
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.
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
Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I'm sure of this I've always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.
Yo-Yo Ma