Bruce Lee Quotes On Life

1. 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.


2. Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.

3. 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.

4. A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.

5. Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them.

6. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.



7. A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.

8. 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.

9. I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations and you're not in this world to live up to mine.




10. Knowledge will give you power, but character respect.

11. A quick temper will make a fool of you soon enough.

12. As you think, so shall you become.








13. If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you'll never get it done.

14. 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.

15. Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.




16. Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.

17. The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.

18. To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.

19. All fixed set patterns are incapable of adaptability or pliability. The truth is outside of all fixed patterns.

20. Real living is living for others. 

21. It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.


22. The less effort, the faster and more powerful you will be.

23. Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.

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

25. 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.


26. Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.

27. The possession of anything begins in the mind.

28. Obey the principles without being bound by them.





29. You just wait. I'm going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.

30. Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.

31. 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. 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.

32. Be happy, but never satisfied.


33. Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.

34. 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.

35. If you don't want to slip up tomorrow, speak the truth today.

36. Don't fear failure. Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.





37. Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.

38. 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.

39. Knowing is not enough, we must apply. Willing is not enough, we must do.

40. 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.

41. 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!!

42. Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.

43. 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.

44. For it is easy to criticize and break down the spirit of others, but to know yourself takes a lifetime.

45. 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.

46. A good teacher protects his pupils from his own influence.

47. Time means a lot to me because you see I am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing.

48. Be self aware, rather than a repetitious robot.

49. Art calls for complete mastery of techniques, developed by reflection within the soul.

50. Now I see that I will never find the light unless, like the candle, I am my own fuel, consuming myself.







51. The spirit of the individual is determined by his dominating thought habits.

52. 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.

53. Defeat is not defeat unless accepted as a reality - in your own mind.

54. 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.

55. Using no way as a way, having no limitation as limitation.

56. 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.

57. Boards don't hit back.

58. The stillness in stillness is not the real stillness; only when there is stillness in movement does the universal rhythm manifest.

59. 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.

60. The "moment" has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time.

61. Learning is never cumulative, it is a movement of knowing which has no beginning and no end.





62. The measure  of the moral worth of a man is his happiness. The better the man, the more happiness. Happiness is the synonym of well-being.

63. Never waste energy on worries or negative thoughts, all problems are brought into existence - drop them.

64. Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationship to man etc. Then he becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing.




65. Zen is not "attained" by mirror-wiping mediation, but by "self-forgetfulness in the existential "present" of life here and now." We do not "come", we "are." Don't strive to become, but be.

66. Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness will never seek the light.






67. To grow, to discover, we need involvement which is something I experience everyday, sometimes good, sometimes frustrating.

68. 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.

69. When one has reached maturity in the art, one will have a formless form. It is like ice dissolving in water. When one has no form, one can be all forms; when one has no style, he can fit in with any style.




70. If you want to learn to swim jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.

71. In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup.

72. The knowledge and skills you have achieved are meant to be forgotten so you can float comfortably in emptiness, without obstruction.


73. Life is never stagnation. It is constant movement, un-rhythmic movement, as we as constant change. Things live by moving and gain strength as they go.

74. 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.

75. Fear comes from uncertainty; we can eliminate the fear within us when we know ourselves better. As the great Sun Tzu said: "When you know yourself and your opponent, you will win every time. When you know yourself but not your opponent, you will win one and lose one. However, when you do not know yourself or your opponent, you will be imperiled every time."



What do you think of Bruce Lee's quotes?



Feel free to comment and share this blog post if you find it interesting!