1. “When we have a good balance between thinking and feeling… our actions and lives are always the richer for it.” – Yo Yo Ma
2. “There’s a part of me that’s always charging ahead. I’m the curious kid, always going to the edge.” – Yo Yo Ma
3. “Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.” – Yo Yo Ma
4. “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
5. “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
6. “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
7. “You go through phases. You have to reinvent reasons for playing, and one year’s answer might not do for another.” – Yo Yo Ma
8. “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
9. “Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.” – Yo Yo Ma
10. “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
11. “I want to investigate different cultures, to see how their identities and values affect their music. It’s one way I can get to know our world, at least to a certain depth.” – Yo Yo Ma
12. “start each day with that i don’t understand” – Yo Yo Ma
13. “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
14. “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
15. “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.” – Yo Yo Ma
16. “When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.” – Yo Yo Ma
17. “Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.” – Yo Yo Ma
18. “Nobody else can make the sound you make.” – Yo Yo Ma
19. “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
20. “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
21. “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
22. “Each day I move toward that which I do not understand. The result is a continuous accidental learning which constantly shapes my life.” – Yo Yo Ma
23. “After reaching 50, I began to wonder what the root of life is.” – Yo Yo Ma
24. “People will ask, ‘Are you famous?’ And I always answer, ‘My mother thinks so.’” – Yo Yo Ma
25. “Once something is memorable, it’s living and you’re using it. That to me is the foundation of a creative society.” – Yo Yo Ma
26. “When your heart and your mind are engaged, you cannot go wrong.” – Yo Yo Ma
27. “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
28. “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
29. “Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.” – Yo Yo Ma
30. “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
31. “We may be coming to a new golden age of instrument making.” – Yo Yo Ma
32. “The tango is really a combination of many cultures, though it eventually became the national music of Argentina.” – Yo Yo Ma
33. “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.” – Yo Yo Ma
34. “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.” – Yo Yo Ma
35. “I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.” – Yo Yo Ma
36. “Bach takes you to a very quiet place within yourself, to the inner core, a place where you are calm and at peace.” – Yo Yo Ma
37. “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
38. “Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children’s education.” – Yo Yo Ma
39. “Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.” – Yo Yo Ma
40. “We’re not born creative or destructive. Each one of us has the ability to create or destroy, to leave the world better than we found it, or worse.” – Yo Yo Ma
41. “My teacher, my great cello teacher Leonard Rose, was such a great cellist, and nurturing man, very patient. But I grew up not only admiring him, but obviously Casals, Rostrotovich, Jacqueline du Pre, and many others, including many of my peers and contemporaries.” – Yo Yo Ma
42. “One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people – directors, filmmakers, and writers – over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.” – Yo Yo Ma
43. “Good things happen when you meet strangers.” – Yo Yo Ma
44. “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
45. “If you are only worried about not making a mistake then you will communicate nothing” – Yo Yo Ma
46. “When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner.” – Yo Yo Ma
47. “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
48. “I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.” – Yo Yo Ma
49. “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.” – Yo Yo Ma
50. “Music enhances the education of our children by helping them to make connections and broadening the depth with which they think and feel. If we are to hope for a society of culturally literate people, music must be a vital part of our children’s education.” – Yo Yo Ma
51. “I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.” – Yo Yo Ma
52. “I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.” – Yo Yo Ma
53. “One of the things I love about music is live performance.” – Yo Yo Ma
54. “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.” – Yo Yo Ma
55. “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
56. “Perfection is not very communicative.” – Yo Yo Ma
57. “There’s a part of me that’s always charging ahead. I’m the curious kid, always going to the edge.” – Yo Yo Ma