Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Bruce Lee (American Martial Artist)

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

Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Accomplishment, One liners

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

You just wait. I’m going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Goals

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

It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Time Management, Productivity, Simplicity

Circumstances hell! I make circumstances!
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Chance, Circumstance

If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Time Management, Value

Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.
—Bruce Lee

Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Reality

Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless—like water. Now you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup, you put water into a bottle, 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
Topics: Creativity, Thoughts, Mind, Meditation, Friend, Water

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

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

If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Value, Time Management, Procrastination, Productivity, Thinking

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

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

As you think, so shall you become.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Thinking, Thoughts, Thought

Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Courage, Life, Challenges

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
Topics: Romance, Love

A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
—Bruce Lee

The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. Halfway cultivation runs to ornamentation.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Simplicity

The spiritual force transcends all.—I feel this great creative and spiritual force within me that is greater than faith, greater than ambition, greater than confidence, greater than determination, greater than vision. It is all these combined. My brain becomes magnetized with this dominating force which I hold in my hand.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Spiritual, Determination, Faith, Vision, Spirituality, Great, Spirit, Thoughts, Confidence

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 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

As long as we separate this ‘oneness’ into two, we won’t achieve realization.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Accomplishment

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.
—Bruce Lee

The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Focus

I’m a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Philosophy

One does not accumulate but eliminate. It is not daily increase but daily decrease. The height of cultivation always run to simplicity.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Simplicity

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

To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Opportunity

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