Quote

The worst thing you can do is say to yourself, I want to be just like somebody else. You have to absorb knowledge from someone else, but ultimately you have to find your own voice.

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
Find
Absorb
Thing
Ultimately
Like
Somebody
Worst
Knowledge
Voice
Else
Someone

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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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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Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.
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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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I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.
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As a musician I'm kind of nomadic, Waldo-like. I show up in different places, and I'm witness to unbelievable things.
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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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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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After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.
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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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But an innovation, to grow organically from within, has to be based on an intact tradition, so our idea is to bring together musicians who represent all these traditions, in workshops, festivals, and concerts, to see how we can connect with each other in music.
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There are limits to how much sound a cello can make. That's part of the framing of acoustical instruments. Finding what those limits might be, and then trying to suggest perhaps even the illusion of going beyond is part of that kind of effort.
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People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.'
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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
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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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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.
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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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 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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