Top 60 Yo-Yo Ma Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Creative Quotes

2. “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

3. “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

4. “Nobody else can make the sound you make.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

5. “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

6. “Good things happen when you meet strangers.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

7. “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

8. “Culture opens our hearts to one another. And the currency in culture is not money, but trust.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

9. “A Senegalese poet said ‘In the end we will conserve only what we love. We love only what we understand, and we will understand only what we are taught.’ We must learn about other cultures in order to understand, in order to love, and in order to preserve our common world heritage.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

10. “Our cultural strength has always been derived from our diversity of understanding and experience.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

11. “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

12. “When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

13. “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

14. “I think one of the great things about being a musician is that you never stop learning.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

15. “Music is powered by ideas. If you don’t have clarity of ideas, you’re just communicating sheer sound.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

16. “Music is one of the ways we can achieve a kind of shorthand to understand each other.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

17. “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

18. “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

19. “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.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

20. “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

21. “Perfection is not very communicative.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

22. “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

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

— Yo-Yo Ma

24. “Sharing is a much better way to communicate than proving.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

25. “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

26. “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

27. “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

28. “I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

29. “One of the marks of a great teacher lies not only in an ability to impart knowledge but also in knowing when to encourage a student to go off on his own.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

30. “I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

31. “Jazz has been such a force in music, that any musician, including classical composers, have been influenced, and obviously performers, also.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

32. “Music has always been transnational;.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

33. “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

34. “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.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

35. “Sound is ephemeral, fleeting, but some sort of a physical manifestation can help you hold on to it longer in time. I’m sure of this; I’ve always thought the sound that you make is just the tip of the iceberg, like the person that you see physically is just the tip of the iceberg as well.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

36. “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

37. “I realized late in life that my twin passions are music and people.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

38. “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

39. “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

40. “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

41. “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

42. “There’s a part of me that’s always charging ahead. I’m the curious kid, always going to the edge.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

43. “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

44. “People will ask, ‘Are you famous?’ And I always answer, ‘My mother thinks so.’”

— Yo-Yo Ma

45. “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

46. “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

47. “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

48. “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.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

49. “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.”

— Yo-Yo Ma

50. “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