Remember, you are expressing the techniques and not doing the techniques. If somebody attacks you, your response is not Technique No.1, Stance No. 2, Section 4, Paragraph 5.
Bruce Lee
A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.
Bruce Lee
A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.
Bruce Lee
A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
Bruce Lee
All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.
Bruce Lee
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successfull personality and duplicate it.
Bruce Lee
As you think, so shall you become.
Bruce Lee
Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.
Bruce Lee
Ever since I was a child I have had this instinctive urge for expansion and growth. To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the sincere and honest development of one’s potential.
Bruce Lee
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
Bruce Lee
I’m not in this world to live up to your expectations and you’re not in this world to live up to mine.
Bruce Lee
If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.
Bruce Lee
If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
Bruce Lee
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
Bruce Lee
Showing off is the fool’s idea of glory.
Bruce Lee
Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.
Bruce Lee
Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
Bruce Lee
The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.
Bruce Lee
The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.
Bruce Lee
The possession of anything begins in the mind.
Bruce Lee
To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.
Bruce Lee
To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
Bruce Lee
To me, the extraordinary aspect of martial arts lies in its simplicity. The easy way is also the right way, and martial arts is nothing at all special; the closer to the true way of martial arts, the less wastage of expression there is.
Bruce Lee
You just wait. I’m going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.
Bruce Lee
It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
Bruce Lee
Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
Bruce Lee
Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.
Bruce Lee
Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
Bruce Lee
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
Bruce Lee
Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.
Bruce Lee
Obey the principles without being bound by them.
Bruce Lee
Real living is living for others.
Bruce Lee
Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
Bruce Lee
Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
Bruce Lee
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.
Bruce Lee
Nowadays you don’t go around on the street kicking people, punching people — because if you do, well that’s it — I don’t care how good you are.
Bruce Lee
Soon my fists began to swell from hitting his hard head. Right then I realized Wing Chun was not too practical and began to alter my way of fighting.
Bruce Lee
You know what I want to think of myself? As a human being. Because, I mean I don’t want to be like “As Confucius say,” but under the sky, under the heavens there is but one family. It just so happens that people are different.
Bruce Lee
When you’re talking about fighting, as it is, with no rules, well then, baby you’d better train every part of your body!
Bruce Lee
All types of knowledge, ultimately mean self knowledge.
Bruce Lee
Boards don’t hit back.
Bruce Lee
A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract; and when he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, “I” do not hit, “it” hits all by itself.
Bruce Lee
Don’t think, feel….it is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!
Bruce Lee
Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
Bruce Lee
Forget about winning and losing; forget about pride and pain. Let your opponent graze your skin and you smash into his flesh; let him smash into your flesh and you fracture his bones; let him fracture your bones and you take his life. Do not be concerned with escaping safely — lay your life before him.
Bruce Lee
There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. If it kills you, it kills you. A man must constantly exceed his level.
Bruce Lee
Don’t get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Now water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
Bruce Lee
Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles.
Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.
Bruce Lee
Jeet Kune Do favors formlessness so that it can assume all forms and since Jeet Kune Do has no style, it can fit in with all styles. As a result, Jeet Kune Do utilizes all ways and is bound by none and, likewise, uses any techniques which serve its end.
Bruce Lee
When there is freedom from mechanical conditioning, there is simplicity. The classical man is just a bundle of routine, ideas and tradition. If you follow the classical pattern, you are understanding the routine, the tradition, the shadow — you are not understanding yourself.
Bruce Lee
Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.
Bruce Lee
Reality is apparent when one ceases to compare. There is “what is” only when there is no comparison at all, and to live with what is, is to be peaceful.
Bruce Lee
Reality is being itself. It is being itself, in becoming itself. Reality in its isness, the “isness” of a thing. Thus isness is the meaning — having freedom in its primary sense — not limited by attachments, confinements, partialization, complexities.
Bruce Lee
A self-willed man obeys a different law, the one law I, too, hold absolutely sacred — the human law in himself, his own individual will.
Bruce Lee
One should be in harmony with, not in opposition to, the strength and force of the opposition. This means that one should do nothing that is not natural or spontaneous; the important thing is not to strain in any way.
Bruce Lee
The dualistic philosophy reigned supreme in Europe, dominating the development of Western science. But with the advent of atomic physics, findings based on demonstrable experiment were seen to negate the dualistic theory, and the trend of thought since then has been back to the monistic conception of the ancient Taoists.
Bruce Lee
When we hold to the core, the opposite sides are the same if they are seen from the center of the moving circle. I do not experience; I am experience. I am not the subject of experience; I am that experience. I am awareness. Nothing else can be I or can exist.
Bruce Lee
Taoist philosophy … is essentially monistic. … Matter and energy, Yang and Yin, heaven and earth, are conceived of as essentially one or as two coexistent poles of one indivisible whole.
Bruce Lee
Voidness is that which stands right in the middle between this and that. The void is all-inclusive; having no opposite, there is nothing which it excludes or opposes. The all illuminating light shines and is beyond the movement of the opposites.
Bruce Lee
Like everyone else you want to learn the way to win. But never to accept the way to lose. To accept defeat — to learn to die — is to be liberated from it. Once you accept, you are free to flow and to harmonize. Fluidity is the way to an empty mind. You must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying.
Bruce Lee
Like everyone else you want to learn the way to win, but never to accept the way to lose — to accept defeat. To learn to die is to be liberated from it. So when tomorrow comes you must free your ambitious mind and learn the art of dying!
Bruce Lee
True thusness is the substance of thought, and thought is the function of true thusness. There is no thought except that of true thusness. Thusness does not move, but its motion and function are inexhaustible.
Bruce Lee
Balance your thoughts with action. If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
Bruce Lee
Concepts vs. self-actualization. Instead of dedicating your life to actualize a concept of what you should be like, ACTUALIZE YOURSELF. The process of maturing does not mean to become a captive of conceptualization. It is to come to the realization of what lies in our innermost selves.
Bruce Lee
Life is better lived than conceptualized. This writing can be less demanding should I allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I’ve come to understand that life is best to be lived — not to be conceptualized. If you have to think, you still do not understand.
Bruce Lee
Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
Bruce Lee
What you habitually think largely determines what you will ultimately become.
Bruce Lee
All that we are is the result of what we have thought. The mind is everything. What we think, we become.
Bruce Lee
Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. To realize that it’s just an inconvenience, that it is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up.
Bruce Lee
The change is from inner to outer. We start by dissolving our attitude not by altering outer conditions.
Bruce Lee
Choose the positive. You have choice — you are master of your attitude — choose the POSITIVE, the CONSTRUCTIVE. Optimism is a faith that leads to success.
Bruce Lee
Cease negative mental chattering. — If you think a thing is impossible, you’ll make it impossible. Pessimism blunts the tools you need to succeed.
Bruce Lee
A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.
Bruce Lee
Don’t fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
Bruce Lee
