Bruce Lee Quotes

A martial arts practice hall, a dojo, is a place you go to practice being the best you can be. But the true combat in a dojo is not between one person and another as most people believe it to be. The true combat in a martial arts practice hall is between the people within ourselves.

Martial arts are a vehicle for developing your human potential.

In martial arts, the biggest enemy is self. Inside you struggle because you want to prove something.

I practice martial arts not to win over other people but to win over my own heart.

I must only warn you of one thing. You have become a different person in the course of these years. For this is what the art of archery means: a profound and far-reaching contest of the archer with himself. Perhaps you have hardly noticed it yet, but you will feel it very strongly when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country: things will no longer harmonize as before. You will see with other eyes and measure with other measures. It has happened to me too, and it happens to all who are touched by the spirit of this art.

All types of knowledge ultimately lead to self-knowledge. So, therefore, these people are asking me to teach them, not so much how to defend themselves or how to do somebody in. Rather, they want to learn to express themselves through some movement, be it anger, be it determination or whatever. So, in other words, they're paying me to show them, in combative form, the art of expressing the human body.

The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying.

The disease we all have and that we have to fight against all our lives is ... the disease of self.

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.

He who knows others is wise. He who knows himself is enlightened.

For me, the martial arts is a search for something inside. It's not just a physical discipline.

How well I walk my talk, and not talk my talk, determines the quality of my engagement, of all my experience with what is quite personally my God. I'm my greatest teacher, and within me, I have the power to push myself deeper and higher.

There is a difference between a fighter and a martial artist. A fighter is training for a purpose: He has a fight. I'm a martial artist. I don't train for a fight. I train for myself. I'm training all the time. My goal is perfection. But I will never reach perfection.

A true knowledge of ourselves is knowledge of our power.

I know that inner wisdom is more precious than wealth. The more you spend it, the more you gain.

The greater jihad is proclaiming war on our ego's destructive and negative emotions and thoughts... which prevent us from attaining perfection.

The better you understand yourself the less cause you will find to love yourself.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

The hardest victory is the victory over self.

Self-knowledge is the great power by which we comprehend and control our lives

How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization!

The real purpose of the martial arts must be to purge oneself of petty ambitions and desire, to obtain control of one’s own character.

Martial arts have two parts. One is external, other internal. The external is physical part. The internal is philosophy of how to be, what kind of person learns martial arts.

The highest strength is acquired not in overcoming the world, but in overcoming one's self. Learn to be cruel to thyself, to withstand thy appetites, to bear thy sufferings, and thou shalt become free and able.

Self-assurance is contemptible and fatal unless it is self-knowledge.