martial arts principles Quotes

This is truth: When you sacrifice your life, you must make fullest use of your weaponry. It is false not to do so, and to die with a weapon as yet undrawn.

Well all tai chi has the martial aspect to it, a lot of people don't know, a lot of the teachers won't show it, or they do show it but you don't really learn it, what the application is.

Martial arts, like any art, is an unrestricted athletic expression of an individual soul.

There were lots of things that I recognized from my experience with Eagle Claw and Wu Hao, and here was the combination of the whole kit and kaboodle, the whole tamale in one.

The essence of fighting is the art of moving at the right time.

People study martial arts for many reasons, sometimes all the wrong reasons. For example, I have had potential students come to my dojo with a belligerent and cocky attitude. When I ask why they want to study my art, their response has indicated to me that their goal is to learn to fight, which is the antithesis of the philosophy I hope to instill: I want them to know how to defend themselves if necessary, but to avoid fighting whenever possible because they will have nothing to prove by fighting.

You can't hit without your hands.

The big rules of knife fighting are (a) do not try it at home, and (b) the whole point is never, ever use the blade. It is there to distract your opponent. While he stares at the gleaming steel, you kick his balls to kingdom come--he's all yours. Just a tip!

If someone teaches you alignment and - I'm not a tai chi expert by any stretch - so interviewing me about tai chi is kind of the cart before the horse - but just from my point of view as a student, it's simply that Master Ren can show you the relationship of power, stance and form.

All martial art is simply an honest expression of one's body — with a lot of deception in between.

I've found that from my point of view, the Chen style contained many things that I knew on a fairly superficial level from Eagle Claw, and that had Chen elements of what seemed to me the soft in Eagle Claw.

I wanted to know what exactly martial arts is. When you look at martial arts films, the later ones became more and more exaggerated. It's like, wow, is martial arts only a show?

I'd always done martial arts I was always interested in fighting.

In my mind, martial arts movies are martial arts movies and action is action. It's quite different, because martial arts doesn't just have physical form; you have a philosophy, internal and external. A lot of it involves your life. How you see the world. An action film I think is just about the movement. I think it's different.