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
Circumstances hell! I make circumstances!
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Circumstance, Chance
If you love life, don’t waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Value, Time Management
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
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
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
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: Love, Romance
I am learning to understand rather than immediately judge or to be judged. I cannot blindly follow the crowd and accept their approach. I will not allow myself to indulge in the usual manipulating game of role creation. Fortunately for me, my self-knowledge has transcended that and I have come to understand that life is best to be lived and not to be conceptualized. I am happy because I am growing daily and I am honestly not knowing where the limit lies. To be certain, every day there can be a revelation or a new discovery. I treasure the memory of the past misfortunes. It has added more to my bank of fortitude.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Happiness
It’s not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Simplicity, Productivity, Time Management
You just wait. I’m going to be the biggest Chinese Star in the world.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Goals
Obey the principles without being bound by them.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Principles
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
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
A wise man can learn more from a foolish question than a fool can learn from a wise answer.
—Bruce Lee
I’m a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Philosophy
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
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: Friend, Mind, Thoughts, Creativity, Meditation, Water
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
The height of cultivation runs to simplicity. Halfway cultivation runs to ornamentation.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Simplicity
As long as we separate this ‘oneness’ into two, we won’t achieve realization.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Accomplishment
Ideas are the beginning of all achievement.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: One liners, Accomplishment
The successful warrior is the average man, with laser-like focus.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Focus
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 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: Determination, Spiritual, Spirit, Confidence, Vision, Faith, Thoughts, Great, Spirituality
The future looks extremely bright indeed, with lots of possibilities ahead—big possibilities. Like the song says, “We’ve just begun.”
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Future, The Future
Take things as they are. Punch when you have to punch. Kick when you have to kick.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Reality
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
As you think, so shall you become.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Thought, Thoughts, 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
Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage. Truth is outside all patterns.
—Bruce Lee
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
Don’t fear failure. — Not failure, but low aim, is the crime. In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Failures, Mistakes
If you spend too much time thinking about a thing, you’ll never get it done.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Value, Thinking, Productivity, Procrastination, Time Management
Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Courage, Challenges, Life
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
Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own.
—Bruce Lee
Notice that the stiffest tree is most easily cracked, while the bamboo or willow survives by bending with the wind.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Change
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
To hell with circumstances; I create opportunities.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Opportunity
Man, the living creature, the creating individual, is always more important than any established style or system.
—Bruce Lee
Topics: Creativity
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
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