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

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
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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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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.
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I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.
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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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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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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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There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
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Music has always been transnational people pick up whatever interests them, and certainly a lot of classical music has absorbed influences from all over the world.
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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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Perfection is not very communicative
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Many of the Central Asians know Russian, and Ted Levin speaks it fluently. I speak Chinese, but Mongolian is completely different, so we had to have translators.
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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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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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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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I have yet to find something that beats the power of being in love, or the power of music at its most magical.
Yo-Yo Ma