Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
Bruce Lee
Truth has no path. Truth is living and, therefore, changing. Awareness is without choice, without demand, without anxiety; in that state of mind, there is perception. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person. Awareness has no frontier; it is giving of your whole being, without exclusion.
Bruce Lee
To contemplate a thing implies maintaining oneself OUTSIDE it, resolved to keep a distance between it and ourselves.
Bruce Lee
Running water never grows stale. So you just have to ‘keep on flowing.’
Bruce Lee
If one loves, one need not have an ideology of love.
Bruce Lee
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
Bruce Lee
Neither. I think of myself as a human being.
Bruce Lee when asked if he thought of himself as Chinese or American
In Jeet Kune Do, it’s not how much you have learned, but how much you have absorbed from what you have learned. It is not how much fixed knowledge you can accumulate, but what you can apply livingly that counts. ‘Being’ is more valued than “doing”.
Bruce Lee
You have to keep your reflexes so that when you want it, it’s there. When you want to move, you are moving. And when you move, you are determined to move! Not accepting even one inch less than 100 percent of your honest feelings. Not anything less than that. So that is the type of thing you have to train yourself into. To become one with your feelings so that, when you think — it is.
Bruce Lee
In life, what more can you ask for than to be real? To fulfill one’s potential instead of wasting energy on [attempting to] actualize one’s dissipating image, which is not real and an expenditure of one’s vital energy. We have great work ahead of us, and it needs devotion and much, much energy. To grow, to discover, we need involvement, which is something I experience every day — sometimes good, sometimes frustrating. No matter what, you must let your inner light guide you out of the darkness.
Bruce Lee
None whatsoever.
Bruce Lee When asked what major religion he was affiliated with in 1972 by journalist Alex Ben Block, p. 128
To be perfectly frank, I really do not.
Bruce Lee When asked if he believed in God, p. 128
I believe in sleeping.
Bruce Lee When asked by his brother Robert if he believed in God, p. 129
There is no such thing as maturity. There is instead an ever-evolving process of maturing. Because when there is a maturity, there is a conclusion and a cessation. That’s the end. That’s when the coffin is closed. You might be deteriorating physically in the long process of aging, but your personal process of daily discovery is ongoing. You continue to learn more and more about yourself every day.
Bruce Lee
Whether or not we can get together, remember well that art “lives” where absolute freedom is. With all the training thrown to nowhere, with a mind (if there is such a verbal substance) perfectly unaware of its own working, with the “self” vanishing nowhere, the art of JKD attains its perfection.
Bruce Lee
You must have complete determination. The worst opponent you can come across is one whose aim has become an obsession. For instance, if a man has decided that he is going to bite off your nose no matter what happens to him in the process, the chances are he will succeed in doing it. He may be severely beaten up, too, but that will not stop him from carrying out his objective. That is the real fighter.
Bruce Lee
Walk on.
Bruce Lee
Jeet Kune Do: Bruce Lee’s Commentaries on the Martial Way (1997) edited by John Little
Bruce Lee
The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.
Bruce Lee
Jeet Kune Do rejects all restrictions imposed by form and formality and emphasizes the clever use of the mind and body to defend and attack.
Bruce Lee
An instructor should exemplify the things he seeks to teach. It will be of great advantage if you yourself can do all you ask of your students and more.
Bruce Lee
As an instructor, you must be able to distinguish between poor performance caused by lack of ability or aptitude on the part of the student and poor performance caused by lack of effort. You should treat the first with patience and the latter with firmness. You must never apply sarcasm and ridicule.
Bruce Lee
Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man’s mind can conceive and believe.
Bruce Lee
Even today, I dare not say that I have reached a state of achievement. I’m still learning, for learning is boundless.
Bruce Lee
The man who is really serious, with the urge to find out what truth is, has no style at all. He lives only in what is.
Bruce Lee
Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact.
Bruce Lee
The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible.
Bruce Lee
Faith is a state of mind that can be conditioned through self-discipline. Faith will accomplish.
Bruce Lee
Faith makes it possible to achieve that which man’s mind can conceive and believe.
Bruce Lee
Possession of anything begins in the mind.
Bruce Lee
Thoughts are things.
Bruce Lee
Make at least one definite move daily toward your goal.
Bruce Lee
The intangible represents the real power of the universe. It is the seed of the tangible.
Bruce Lee
The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.
Bruce Lee
Emptiness the starting point.
Bruce Lee
We all have time to spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.
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
Emptiness the starting point. — In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup. My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty.
Bruce Lee
Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
Bruce Lee
Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! So, in order to live life whole-heartedly, the answer is life simply is.
Bruce Lee
The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a pattern of systems.
Bruce Lee
The aphorism “as a man thinketh in his heart so is he” contains the secret of life.
Bruce Lee
Meaning is found in relationship. Meaning is the relationship of the foreground figure to the background.
Bruce Lee
Life is never stagnation. It is constant movement, unrhythmic movement, as we as constant change. Things live by moving and gain strength as they go.
Bruce Lee
Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
Bruce Lee
The primary reality is not what I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think.
Bruce Lee
The timeless moment. The “moment” has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time.
Bruce Lee
Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.
Bruce Lee
To realize freedom the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness — care for watching, but don’t stop and interpret “I am free,” then you’re living in a memory of something that has gone before.
Bruce Lee
To spend time is to pass it in a specified manner. To waste time is to expend it thoughtlessly or carelessly. We all have time to spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.
Bruce Lee
Time means a lot to me because, you see, i, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
Bruce Lee
Be aware of doing your best to understand the ROOT in life, and realize the DIRECT and the INDIRECT are in fact a complementary WHOLE. It is to see things as they are and not to become attached to anything — to be unconscious meant to be be innocent of the working of a relative (empirical) mind — where there is no abiding of though anywhere on anything — this is being unbound. This not abiding anywhere is the root of our life.
Bruce Lee
Concentration is the ROOT of all the higher abilities in man.
Bruce Lee
Seek to understand the root. It is futile to argue as to which single leaf, which design of branch, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming.
Bruce Lee
What we are after is the ROOT and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds “body feel” and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity.
Bruce Lee
Flow in the living moment. We are always in a process of becoming and NOTHING is fixed. Have no rigid system in you, and you’ll be flexible to change with the ever changing. OPEN yourself and flow, my friend. Flow in the TOTAL OPENNESS OF THE LIVING MOMENT. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.
Bruce Lee
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
Bruce Lee
You cannot force the Now. But can you neither condemn nor justify and yet be extraordinarily alive as you walk on? You can never invite the wind, but you must leave the window open.
Bruce Lee
The Moment is freedom. I couldn’t live by a rigid schedule. I try to live freely from moment to moment, letting things happen and adjusting to them.
Bruce Lee
The Now is indivisible. Completeness, the now, is an absence of the conscious mind to strive to divide that which is indivisible. For once the completeness of things is taken apart it is no longer complete.
Bruce Lee
What IS is more important than WHAT SHOULD BE. To many people are looking at “what is” from a position of thinking “what should be.”
Bruce Lee
Conditioning obstructs our view of reality. We do not see IT in its suchness because of our indoctrination, crooked and twisted.
Bruce Lee
True thusness is without defiling thought; it cannot be known through conception and thought.
Bruce Lee
