“Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own.”

—  Bruce Lee

Variant: Absorb what is useful, discard what is useless and add what is specifically your own
Source: Bruce Lee — Wisdom for the Way

Last update Oct. 1, 2023. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own." by Bruce Lee?
Bruce Lee photo
Bruce Lee 193
Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and f… 1940–1973

Related quotes

Tim Powers photo

“The seas and the weathers are what is; your vessels adapt to them or sink.”

Source: On Stranger Tides (1987), Chapter 1 (p. 9, repeated on p. 53)

Huangbo Xiyun photo

“The foolish reject what they see and not what they think; the wise reject what they think and not what they see.”

Huangbo Xiyun Chinese Zen Buddhist

As quoted in Visions from Earth (2004) by James R. Miller, p. 17

Sarah Mlynowski photo

“We're all crazy. What's your specific form of crazy?”

Sarah Mlynowski (1977) Novelist

Source: Ten Things We Did

“Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward.”

M. H. Abrams (1912–2015) American literary theorist

People's Education interview (2007)
Context: Pay attention to your students. Hear what they say, try to find out what their capacities are, what make sense to them. Adapt what you are doing and saying to those capacities, but make your students stretch upward. I think the trick is to adapt to the level of a student, but never rest on that level — always make them reach out. … If a student does not quite get it the first time, he or she will come back and get it later. If you don’t set your writing — and teaching — at a level that makes them stretch, they are never going to develop their intellectual muscle.

Nigel Cumberland photo

“Rather than let the rejections deter you from your objectives, simply aim to learn what the rejections teach you.”

Nigel Cumberland (1967) British author and leadership coach

Source: Your Job-Hunt Ltd – Advice from an Award-Winning Asian Headhunter (2003), p.35

Georges Bernanos photo

“And knowing that in every specific battle, what we are fighting for is merely the substitution of the human agenda for the corporate agenda is what can guide and sustain us.”

Robin Hahnel (1946) American economist

Source: Panic Rules!: Everything You Need to Know about the Global Economy, 1999, p. 103

Emil M. Cioran photo
Paul R. Halmos photo
Georges Bataille photo

“An intention that rejects what has no meaning in fact is a rejection of the entirety of being.”

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) French intellectual and literary figure

Source: On Nietzsche (1945), p. xxx

Related topics