A Quote by Yo-Yo Ma

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.
Everything that you've learned: 'Make a lot of money, have a nice house'. But they never teach you at school how to relate, how to communicate with others, how to share values with others. ...They teach you how to make a living. You become an optometrist, he becomes a physicist, she becomes a structural engineer, he's an architect. In the future, none of that. Everybody is trained to be a generalist, so they understand different cultures, different values, how we get to be the way we are. So no-one can ever use you for war or killing anybody or hurting anybody
In opening we can see how many times we have mistaken small identities and fearful beliefs for our true nature and how limiting this is. We can touch with great compassion the pain from the contracted identities that we and others have created in the world.
We all inhabit our lives, in different ways to some degree. We see ourselves a certain way, and based on how we see ourselves, that's how we see the world.
People will say, 'How do I get abs like you?' I don't know. We're all different. If my girlfriend did what I did, hiking and yoga for a workout, it would affect her body in a different way. That's the message that I really want to get out there. I'm trying to counteract that culture.
I'm primarily a poet, so I'd have to say in my case I'd investigate the mystery in poetry in a different way than prose might investigate it, in a way that includes the power of the music of language and maybe more imaginatively in poetry, but I don't really know about better or worse. I guess it depends on the writer.
Once you see how powerful music is and how it can affect people, then you want to use it to impact the world.
For me being able to see all different places where I've skied and cherish them, and be able to see them - really see them - is something that I'm passionate about. I'm into photography, so I really enjoy taking photos of all the places that I've gone. I think that's the coolest part about being an Olympic sportsman, I get to travel around and see the world for free, technically. And get to see different cultures, and all the different people that I've met along the way - it's a pretty awesome job.
I feel concerned by what happens in the world.... I don't want to merely document; I want to know why a certain thing disturbs or attracts me and how a situation can affect the person involved.
It's going to be an interesting dilemma for certain corporations. They've worked so hard to make themselves important in the way music goes out into the world, but it's completely irrelevant when people can get their music in a different way.
After a young adulthood trying to get him to see the world for how it really is, my brother Wes and I have come back to the way our dad is, realizing that it's sometimes our job to see the world as it could be, as we want it to be.
If people want to get to know me better, they've got to know my parents and the values my parents instilled in me, and the fact that I was raised in West Texas, in the middle of the desert, a long way away from anywhere, hardly. There's a certain set of values you learn in that experience.
A TV show has to be a certain length and, you know, you have expectations from the viewers. You know, you want to see the characters again, or you want to see certain dynamics between the characters or certain kinds of storylines. And you kind of figure out how to best fit what you want to say into that format.
People of different religions and cultures live side by side in almost every part of the world, and most of us have overlapping identities which unite us with very different groups. We can love what we are, without hating what โ€“ and who โ€“ we are not. We can thrive in our own tradition, even as we learn from others, and come to respect their teachings.
Everyone has a past, but I try not to let that affect the way I see them; I want to get to know who they are today.
I don't know if the books are making the world a much better place. I don't write with that objective. What I know is that I see my readers creating a critical mass so we can at least understand this world in a different way.
I've always paid a lot of attention to the way that different kinds of media affect how we see the world, probably because I've been an actor since I was a little kid.
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