Bruce Lee Quotes

Meaning is found in relationship. — Meaning is the relationship of the foreground figure to the background.

Everything you do, if not in a relaxed state will be done at a lesser level than you are proficient. Thus the tensed expert marksman will aim at a level less than his/her student.

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.

Take inventory of everyone with whom you have contact.

Moving, be like water. Still, be like a mirror. Respond like an echo.

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.

Do not practice finely skilled movements after you are tired, for you will begin to substitute gross motions for finer ones and generalized efforts for specific ones. Remember, wrong movements tend to supervene and the athlete's progress is set back. Thus, the athlete practices fine skills only while he is fresh. When he becomes fatigued, he shifts to tasks employing gross movements designed principally to develop endurance.

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.

Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.

To be perfectly frank, I really do not.

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.

To Bruce Lee, philosophy was not the professional playground of academics, but every human being’s gateway to the greatest adventure of the human spirit. It illuminated the frontiers of human possibility and obliterated the shadows of doubt and insecurity. Unlike others, content to follow, Bruce Lee insisted upon charting his own course toward truth, and he encouraged those who wished to share his insights to do likewise. While Lee was a champion of individual rights and individual development, both of which stress the sovereignty of the individual as an end in himself, he also spoke to something deeper — the commonality of all human beings and the removal of such artificial barriers to true brotherhood as nationality, ethnicity, and class structure, so that human beings could live together peaceably as independent equals. Bruce Lee rejected blind obedience to

To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.

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.

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.