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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.

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
Keep
Planning
Must
Plan
Thing
Plans
Years
Learning
Always
Possible
Life
High
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Curve
Five
Curves

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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One of the things I love about music is live performance.
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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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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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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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When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.
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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.
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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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I think there are so many ways to become interested in music. I believe signs of sustained interest gives a sense of the right time. Music, if thought of as a language, would perhaps indicate that as early as possible is not so bad. I do believe that a really nurturing first teacher that makes the child love something is crucial.
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The role of the musician is to go from concept to full execution. Put another way, it's to go from understanding the content of something to really learning how to communicate it and make sure it's well-received and lives in somebody else.
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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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When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.
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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.
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