QuoteProject
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
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

This quote emphasizes the importance of appreciating diverse forms of music and how they reflect life's complexities, encouraging openness to change.

Yo-Yo Ma's quote highlights the beauty and diversity found in individual expressions of music, each carrying its unique rhythm, language, and cultural significance. As we embrace this variety, we become more receptive to the changes in life and gain a deeper understanding of our surroundings, fostering adaptability and openness to new experiences.

Themes

MusicLifeDiversityHeritageOpennessAdaptability

In practice

Example use cases

During a TED Talk about cultural diversity, you can use the quote to illustrate the importance of understanding different backgrounds.

More from Yo-Yo Ma

As a child, you respond physically, tactically. You're delighted by sound, you're delighted by recognizing something. It's like hide and seek. Is it there? Is it not there? Is it this note? Is it not this note? It's one fantastic game.
Yo-Yo MaRead
There's a part of me that's always charging ahead. I'm the curious kid, always going to the edge.
Yo-Yo MaRead
I think that peace is, in many ways, a precondition of joy.
Yo-Yo MaRead
I think anybody who goes away finds you appreciate home more when you return.
Yo-Yo MaRead
When we enlarge our view of the world, we deepen our understanding of our own lives.
Yo-Yo MaRead
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 MaRead

Similar quotes

As a direct line to human feeling, empathic experience, genuine language and detail, poetry is everything that headline news is not. It takes us inside situations, helps us imagine life from more than one perspective, honors imagery and metaphor - those great tools of thought - and deepens our confidence in a meaningful world.
Naomi Shihab NyeRead
Against Him those women sin who torment their skin with potions, stain their cheeks with rouge and extend the line of their eyes with black coloring. Doubtless they are dissatisfied with God's plastic skill. In their own persons they convict and censure the Artificer of all things.
TertullianRead
I was this young boy and I saw this man with his hands round my sister's neck, I was just standing there with her two children beside me... Everything I've done since then was for the purpose of making women look stronger, not naïve. And so, when everyone started saying I was a misogynist, that really freaked me out. They didn't know me. They didn't know what I had seen in my life. That was the first part of fashion that I hated - people labeling me without knowing me.
Alexander McqueenRead
If you can tell stories, create characters, devise incidents, and have sincerity and passion, it doesn't matter a damn how you write.
W. Somerset MaughamRead
I think the rhythm is like the spine of the piece. If you change that, then the body that forms around it is changed as well.
Peter GabrielRead
A designer without a sense of history is worth nothing
Massimo VignelliRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.