# The most famous Bruce Lee quotes

"Be water, my friend", "Don't think, feel" and "Boards don't hit back": Bruce Lee's best-known lines, with the film, interview or book they come from.

- 224 votes · 11 items
- May 31, 2018 · Oscar Griffiths
- https://even.best/en/l/4815/the-most-famous-bruce-lee-quotes

## Top 11

1. **Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless, like water. Be water, my friend.** (23 · ▲25 ▼2) — Lines he wrote for the TV series Longstreet (1971).
2. **Don't think, feel. It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon.** (22 · ▲23 ▼1) — Enter the Dragon (1973).
3. **Boards don't hit back.** (17 · ▲21 ▼4) — Enter the Dragon (1973), to O'Hara.
4. **Running water never grows stale. So you just have to 'keep on flowing.'** (16 · ▲19 ▼3) — The Warrior Within (1996), p. 48.
5. **All types of knowledge ultimately mean self-knowledge.** (15 · ▲19 ▼4) — Bruce Lee: The Lost Interview, with Pierre Berton (1971).
6. **There are no limits. There are plateaus, but you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.** (15 · ▲17 ▼2) — The Art of Expressing the Human Body (1998).
7. **Using no way as way; having no limitation as limitation.** (13 · ▲16 ▼3) — Motto of Jeet Kune Do, in The Warrior Within (1996).
8. **Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless and add what is essentially your own.** (9 · ▲14 ▼5) — Striking Thoughts (2000), p. 176.
9. **Neither. I think of myself as a human being.** (9 · ▲12 ▼3) — When asked whether he saw himself as Chinese or American; The Warrior Within (1996), p. 87.
10. **I'm still learning, for learning is boundless.** (7 · ▲13 ▼6) — Jeet Kune Do (1997), part 6.
11. **Use only that which works, and take it from any place you can find it.** (6 · ▲9 ▼3) — Quoted in Bruce Lee: Fighting Spirit (1994).

How is this ranking ordered? By people's votes: each ▲ adds a point and each ▼ takes one away. Anyone can vote and add what is missing.