Died: 20 July 1973
Country: Us, Hong Kong
1. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and 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
2. Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves.
- Bruce Lee
3. Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
- Bruce Lee
4. Be happy, but never satisfied.
- Bruce Lee
5. Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.
- Bruce Lee
6. Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one
- Bruce Lee
7. 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
8. I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.
- Bruce Lee
9. Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.
- Bruce Lee
10. A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
- Bruce Lee
11. 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
12. You must be shapeless, formless, like water. When you pour water in a cup, it becomes the cup. When you pour water in a bottle, it becomes the bottle. When you pour water in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Water can drip and it can crash. Become like water my friend.
- Bruce Lee
13. If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.
- Bruce Lee
14. If you always put limits 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
15. The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.
- Bruce Lee
16. To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.
- Bruce Lee
17. It is not a daily increase, but a daily decrease. Hack away at the inessentials.
- Bruce Lee
18. Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.
- Bruce Lee
19. A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.
- Bruce Lee
20. Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.
- Bruce Lee
21. Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successfull personality and duplicate it.
- Bruce Lee
22. Not being tense but ready.
Not thinking but not dreaming.
Not being set but flexible.
Liberation from the uneasy sense of confinement.
It is being wholly and quietly alive, aware and alert, ready for whatever may come.
- Bruce Lee
23. If you don't want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.
- Bruce Lee
24. The doubters said, "Man can not fly," The doers said, "Maybe, but we'll try," And finally soared In the morning glow While non-believers Watched from below.
- Bruce Lee
25. The great mistake is to anticipate the outcome of the engagement; you ought not to be thinking of whether it ends in victory or defeat. Let nature take its course, and your tools will strike at the right moment.
- Bruce Lee
26. For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.
- Bruce Lee
27. A good teacher protects his pupils from his own influence.
- Bruce Lee
28. Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.
- Bruce Lee
29. Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.
- Bruce Lee
30. A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.
- Bruce Lee
31. Self-knowledge involves relationship. To know oneself is to study one self in action with another person. Relationship is a process of self evaluation and self revelation. Relationship is the mirror in which you discover yourself - to be is to be related.
- Bruce Lee
32. Many people dedicate their lives to actualizing a concept of what they should be like, rather than actualizing themselves.
This difference between self-actualization and self-image actualization is very important. Most people live only for their image
- Bruce Lee
33. As you think, so shall you become.
- Bruce Lee
34. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
- Bruce Lee
35. If there is a God, he is within. You don't ask God to give you things, you depend on God for your inner theme.
- Bruce Lee
36. 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
37. 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 either spend or waste and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.
- Bruce Lee
38. Time means a lot to me because you see I am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing.
- Bruce Lee
39. Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.
- Bruce Lee
40. Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot.
- Bruce Lee
41. Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
- Bruce Lee
42. The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.
- Bruce Lee
43. Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.
- Bruce Lee
44. Using no way as a way, having no limitation as limitation.
- Bruce Lee
45. Now I see that I will never find the light
Unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel,
Consuming myself.
- Bruce Lee
46. All knowledge leads to self-knowledge.
- Bruce Lee
47. 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
48. The meaning of life is that it is to be lived, and it is not to be traded and conceptualized and squeezed into a patter of systems.
- Bruce Lee
49. Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.
- Bruce Lee
50. The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
- Bruce Lee
51. The More we value things, the less we value ourselves.
- Bruce Lee
52. Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.
- Bruce Lee
53. Defeat is not defeat unless accepted as a reality-in your own mind.
- Bruce Lee
54. Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own.
- Bruce Lee
55. Real living is living for others.
- Bruce Lee
56. 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.
- Bruce Lee
57. It's like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don't concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.
- Bruce Lee
58. Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water.
- Bruce Lee
59. Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or faster man. But sooner or later the man who wins, is the man who thinks he can.
- Bruce Lee
60. The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.
- Bruce Lee
61. To know oneself is to study oneself in action with another person.
- Bruce Lee
62. Obey the principles without being bound by them.
- Bruce Lee
63. If you think a thing is impossible,you'll only make it impossible.
- Bruce Lee
64. Do not deny the classical approach, simply as a reaction, or you will have created another pattern and trapped yourself there.
- Bruce Lee
65. The idea is that flowing water never goes stale, so just keep on flowing.
- Bruce Lee
67. The possession of anything begins in the mind.
- Bruce Lee
68. If I tell you I'm good, probably you will say I'm boasting. But if I tell you I'm not good, you'll know I'm lying.
- Bruce Lee
69. Effort within the mind further limits the mind, because effort implies struggle towards a goal and when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind.
- Bruce Lee
70. Preparation for tomorrow is hard work today.
- Bruce Lee
71. Bring the mind into sharp focus and make it alert so that it can immediately intuit truth, which is everywhere. The mind must be emancipated from old habits, prejudices, restrictive thought processes and even ordinary thought itself.
- Bruce Lee
72. Don't think. FEEL. It's like a finger pointing at the moon. Do not concentrate on the finger, or you will miss all of the heavenly glory.
- Bruce Lee
73. It is compassion rather than the principle of justice which can guard us against being unjust to our fellow men.
- Bruce Lee
74. The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.
- Bruce Lee
75. 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
