Striking Thoughts : Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living ( 2000 ) edited by John Little
- Emptiness the starting point. — In order to taste my cup of water you must first empty your cup. My friend, drop all your preconceived and fixed ideas and be neutral. Do you know why this cup is useful? Because it is empty.
- Life is wide, limitless. There is no border, no frontier.
- Life lives; and in the living flow, no questions are raised. The reason is that life is a living now! So, in order to live life whole-heartedly, the answer is life simply is.
- 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.
- The aphorism "as a man thinketh in his heart so is he" contains the secret of life.
- p. 4; Lee here quotes Proverbs 23:7 "As he thinketh in his heart, so is he."
- Meaning is found in relationship. — Meaning is the relationship of the foreground figure to the background.
- Life is never stagnation. It is constant movement, unrhythmic movement, as we as constant change. Things live by moving and gain strength as they go.
- Life itself is your teacher, and you are in a state of constant learning.
- The primary reality is not what I think, but that I live, for those also live who do not think.
- The timeless moment. — The "moment" has no yesterday or tomorrow. It is not the result of thought and therefore has no time.
- Knowledge, surely, is always of time, whereas knowing is not of time. Knowledge is from a source, from accumulation, from conclusion, while knowing is a movement.
- To realize freedom the mind has to learn to look at life, which is a vast movement, without the bondage of time, for freedom lies beyond the field of consciousness — care for watching, but don't stop and interpret "I am free," then you're living in a memory of something that has gone before.
- 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 spend or waste, and it is our decision what to do with it. But once passed, it is gone forever.
- Time means a lot to me because, you see, I, too, am also a learner and am often lost in the joy of forever developing and simplifying. If you love life, don't waste time, for time is what life is made up of.
- p. 10; Here Lee paraphrases a much older English proverb: If you care for life, don't waste your time; for time is what life is made of. (as quoted in Bordighera and the Western Riviera (1883) by Frederick Fitzroy Hamilton, p. 189).
- Be aware of doing your best to understand the ROOT in life, and realize the DIRECT and the INDIRECT are in fact a complementary WHOLE. It is to see things as they are and not to become attached to anything — to be unconscious meant to be be innocent of the working of a relative (empirical) mind — where there is no abiding of though anywhere on anything — this is being unbound. This not abiding anywhere is the root of our life.
- Concentration is the ROOT of all the higher abilities in man.
- Seek to understand the root. — It is futile to argue as to which single leaf, which design of branch, or which attractive flower you like; when you understand the root, you understand all its blossoming.
- What we are after is the ROOT and not the branches. The root is the real knowledge; the branches are surface knowledge. Real knowledge breeds "body feel" and personal expression; surface knowledge breeds mechanical conditioning and imposing limitation and squelches creativity.
Source : Wikipedia.
