Bruce Lee (1940–73) was an influential martial artist, pop culture icon, and film actor. He helped popularize martial arts movies in the 1970s and influenced numerous Hollywood action heroes.
Born Lee Yuen Kam in San Francisco’s Chinatown to parents touring with a Hong Kong opera troupe, Lee became a child star in Hong Kong. When he returned to America in his early twenties, Lee developed a new martial arts technique called “Jeet Kune Do” by blending traditional kung fu, fencing, boxing, and Eastern philosophy. He taught martial arts and performed minor roles in TV and film.
In 1971, Lee moved back to Hong Kong and immediately starred in two two wildly successful action flicks that broke box-office records: Tang shan da xiong (1971; The Big Boss in Hong Kong, Fists of Fury in USA) and Jing wu men (1972; Fist of Fury, The Chinese Connection.)
Lee produced, directed, wrote, and starred in his next film, Meng long guo jiang (1972, The Way of the Dragon, Return of the Dragon.) Lee’s subsequent film Enter the Dragon (1973) became a worldwide hit and thrust him into international super-stardom. Unfortunately, Lee died a sudden and mysterious death six days before the film’s Hong Kong release. An unfinished film called Game of Death (1978) was compiled with stand-ins and paper cutouts of Lee’s face.
Over the decades, Lee’s action performances, onscreen humor, and dramatic sensibility in his five films cultivated a considerable following. Lee became a prominent pop culture icon of the 20th century.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Bruce Lee
We shall find the answer when we examine the problem, the problem is never apart from the answer, the problem IS the answer, understanding the problem dissolves the problem.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Problems
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Focus
Circumstances hell! I make circumstances!
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Chance, Circumstance
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
Topics: Expectation
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successfull personality and duplicate it.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Personality
It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Productivity, Simplicity, Time Management
Take no thought of who is right or wrong or who is better than. Be not for or against.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Enemy, Enemies
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
Topics: Time Management
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
Let the spirit out—Discard all thoughts of reward, all hopes of praise and fears of blame, all awareness of one’s bodily self. And, finally closing the avenues of sense perception, let the spirit out, as it will.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Awareness
A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
—Bruce Lee
As you think, so shall you become.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Thinking, Thoughts, Thought
Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.
—Bruce Lee
Obey the principles without being bound by them.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Principles
As long as we separate this ‘oneness’ into two, we won’t achieve realization.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Accomplishment
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
Topics: Simplicity
I’m a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Philosophy
Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Challenges, Life, Courage
The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. Halfway cultivation runs to ornamentation.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Simplicity
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
Topics: Control
Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Reality
You just wait. I’m going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Goals
Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Change
The timeless moment.—The ‘moment’ has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Time Management
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Thinking, Productivity, Value, Procrastination, Time Management
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
Topics: Potential, Growth
The doubters siad,
“Man can not fly,
The doers aid,
“Maybe, but we’ll try,
And finally soared
In the morning glow
While non-believers
Watched from below.
—Bruce Lee
Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Accomplishment, One liners
Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside all patterns.
—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
Topics: Time Management
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