The "Immortality" Quote
I saw a quote attributed to Bruce Lee on social media, and as soon as I read it I knew I was suspicious of its origin.
"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”
If you search for those words, you'll encounter a slew of people quoting it and saying Bruce Lee wrote it.
Early in my research, I found a story which offered two helpful leads. First, it said that the quote appeared at the end of the mostly mythical 1993 "Dragon" Bruce Lee movie. Sure enough, here it is:
Now we have the "sourcing" of this quote to Bruce Lee. I've also seen it attributed to Brandon Lee because of its use in the movie.
Second, the article mentioned that this quote was attributed to St. Augustine.
Using this new search parameter, I found plenty of other people quoted St. Augustine, an early father of the Catholic Church, as being the author, such as this person.
However, I did searches of various repositories of St. Augustine's works, and could not find anything resembling these words.
To give some credit to the Bruce Lee podcast, the show notes for episode 88 say the following:
"There is a quote we use around Bruce Lee that is not actually one of his quotes, but it is: 'The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.'"
That should be enough to convince Bruce Lee fans that he did not invent these words.
However, it doesn't appear that St. Augustine did either!
It's possible that the Dragon movie is actually the source of this quote, in 1993. In that case, the person who added it to the end of the movie should get the credit for creating it.
"The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.”
If you search for those words, you'll encounter a slew of people quoting it and saying Bruce Lee wrote it.
Early in my research, I found a story which offered two helpful leads. First, it said that the quote appeared at the end of the mostly mythical 1993 "Dragon" Bruce Lee movie. Sure enough, here it is:
Now we have the "sourcing" of this quote to Bruce Lee. I've also seen it attributed to Brandon Lee because of its use in the movie.
Second, the article mentioned that this quote was attributed to St. Augustine.
Using this new search parameter, I found plenty of other people quoted St. Augustine, an early father of the Catholic Church, as being the author, such as this person.
However, I did searches of various repositories of St. Augustine's works, and could not find anything resembling these words.
To give some credit to the Bruce Lee podcast, the show notes for episode 88 say the following:
"There is a quote we use around Bruce Lee that is not actually one of his quotes, but it is: 'The key to immortality is first living a life worth remembering.'"
That should be enough to convince Bruce Lee fans that he did not invent these words.
However, it doesn't appear that St. Augustine did either!
It's possible that the Dragon movie is actually the source of this quote, in 1993. In that case, the person who added it to the end of the movie should get the credit for creating it.
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