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" When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling... our actions and lives are always the richer for it. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Good
Feeling
Balance
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" 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. "
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Fall
Faith
Go
" 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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Music
Great
" I've been traveling all over the world for 25 years, performing, talking to people, studying their cultures and musical instruments, and I always come away with more questions in my head than can be answered. "
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Head
World
Studying
" 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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Society
Think
Music
" 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
You
Creativity
Great
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Kind
Illusion
Finding
" A composition is always more than the sum of its parts. In other words, a really good piece of music is more than itself. It's sort of like a prism, which you can see from each facet a single totality. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Always
Music
See
" People will ask, 'Are you famous?' And I always answer, 'My mother thinks so.' "
Yo-Yo Ma
Mother
You
People
" It's easy for me to care about Toronto, because Toronto is a community that cares about itself. It represents the world. It talks to itself, and because it does, it figures out that there must be a music garden as part of its existence. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Easy
World
Me
" 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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Everything
Children
Time
" Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Been
Jazz
Including
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Chinese
Different
Asians
" Mastering music is more than learning technical skills. Practicing is about quality, not quantity. Some days I practice for hours; other days it will be just a few minutes. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Quality
Practice
Music
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Want
View
Back
" Good things happen when you meet strangers. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Good Things
Good
You
" When you learn something from people, or from a culture, you accept it as a gift, and it is your lifelong commitment to preserve it and build on it. "
Yo-Yo Ma
People
Gift
Culture
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Language
Music
Life Changes
" I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Think
Never
Learning
" 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
Muscle
You
Year
" I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Twin
People
Music
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Always
Music
Over
" My involvement in the political arena is to make sure there's a place for culture. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Place
Culture
Involvement
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Way
Content
Learning
" We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making. "
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Age
Coming
Golden
" I remember when I was growing up. My great wish was to understand who I was and how I fit in the world. "
Yo-Yo Ma
World
Great
Growing Up
" It took me way beyond what I knew, into places of which I was totally scared, but as I became less frightened, I welcomed new ways of thinking and approaching something. It made me an infinitely richer person, and I think a better musician. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Thinking
Person
Think
" Music is powered by ideas. If you don't have clarity of ideas, you're just communicating sheer sound. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Just
Sound
You
" 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
Grow
Deep
Time
" 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. "
Yo-Yo Ma
You
Blessed
Life
" There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge. "
Yo-Yo Ma
Ahead
Kid
Me