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When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.

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
Engaged
Wrong
Cannot
Heart
Mind

More quotes by Yo-Yo Ma

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Nobody else can make the sound you make.
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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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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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When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
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Classical music is one of the best things that ever happened to mankind. If you get introduced to it in the right way, it becomes your friend for life.
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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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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
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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 learn something not because I have to, but because I really want to. That's the same view I have for performing. I'm performing because I really want to, not because I have to bring bread back home.
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Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.
Yo-Yo Ma
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I think of a piece of music as something that comes alive when it is being performed, and I feel that my role in the transmission of music is to be its best advocate at that moment.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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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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
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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.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Good things happen when you meet strangers.
Yo-Yo Ma
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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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My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture.
Yo-Yo Ma
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Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound.
Yo-Yo Ma