"Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.”

Did Bruce Lee say the following? "Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” Read on!

Introduction 

Bruce Lee Podcast #69 

I used the Bruce Lee web site and podcast as the starting point for this research. The quote in question  appears on the web page of Bruce Lee podcast number 69, from October 2017, as shown above.

Zero Sources

I thought this would be an easy quote to research. However, I could not find any reputable source for this quote! 

I checked the following authoritative sources for Bruce Lee philosophy, the first four of which are recommended by the Bruce Lee philosophy page. All include Bruce Lee as author, with the exception of the last. The secondary author and first date of publication follow.

Bruce Lee: Wisdom for the Way Shannon Lee, 2009

Bruce Lee: Artist of Life John Little, 1999

Bruce Lee: Striking Thoughts John Little, 2000

Bruce Lee: The Tao of Gung Fu: A Study in the Way of Chinese Martial Art John Little, 1997

Bruce Lee: Letters of the Dragon: The Original 1958-1973 Correspondence John Little, 1998

The Tao of Jeet Kune Do 1995

The Warrior Within: The Philosophies of Bruce Lee John Little, 1996

If you check these books, the word "pray" never appears in a Bruce Lee quote. He only once uses the term "God" once. "Easy" never appears either, although "strength" appears quite often.

If a quote does not appear in these books, I struggle to think of another source that would have it. The series by John Little has scrubbed everything it can from the Bruce Lee library and notebooks. A quote of this simplicity and impact would surely have made it into one of these volumes. In fact, one of these books should have been the source that would be quoted later. That was not the case, apparently.

A Possible Origin

jdk.gr from Internet Archive, 12 August 2007

I did a lot of searching online, and found the earliest extant plausible source belonging to this jdk.gr page, as archived by the Internet Archive on 12 August 2007. There is a ton of text here, a lot of which is attributed to Bruce Lee. I'm not going to touch the rest of this page, but at the bottom of the "philosophy" section this appears:

jdk.gr from Internet Archive, 12 August 2007

No later than February 13, 2009, we see on this copy of the Goodreads page for Bruce Lee preserved by the Internet Archive that some user added the quote to the page.

Goodreads, February 2009

Upon seeing this, and the fact that anyone can add a quote, I suddenly realized that many of the false quotes attributed to Bruce Lee could have started here. Look at the second "quote." I'm not going to investigate that here, but does it even sound like something Bruce Lee would say?

Who Originally Said It

The American Presidency Project, UCSB

If we look at the address that President John F. Kennedy delivered to the 11th Annual Presidential Prayer Breakfast on 7 February 1963, we see the likely origin of this quote. (Better still, you can even listen to JFK deliver it!)

The President closes with these words:

"[L]et us remember the advice of my fellow Bostonian, the Reverend Phillips Brooks: "Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger men! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks."

Who is Reverend Phillips Brooks? 

Phillips Brooks, By unattributed - Kentucky Digital Library, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49011986

According to Wikipedia (good enough for my purposes here):

Phillips Brooks (December 13, 1835 – January 23, 1893) was an American Episcopal clergyman and author, long the Rector of Boston's Trinity Church and briefly Bishop of Massachusetts, and particularly remembered as lyricist of the Christmas hymn, "O Little Town of Bethlehem".

A look inside his 1905 book Christ the Life and Light: Lenten Readings shows the source for JFK's citation.

Reverend Phillips Brooks, Christ the Life and Light: Lenten Readings, 1905

My hypothesis is that JFK popularized this quote from one of Brooks' sermons, published as early as 1886. Someone from the Greek JKD page, or perhaps another source, liked it, and attributed it to Bruce Lee. Then someone else, or perhaps a related individual, added it to the Goodreads page, from which it has continued to deceive readers.

Conclusion

I can confidently say that there is no evidence that Bruce Lee said or wrote "Do not pray for an easy life. Pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.” Bruce Lee was not a religious person and there are no other quotes in the collections I searched where he used the word "pray." 

If you want inspiration through prayer, I recommend a slight adjustment to the entire Revered Brooks quote, thus:

"Do not pray for easy lives. Pray to be stronger people! Do not pray for tasks equal to your powers. Pray for powers equal to your tasks."

If you have a legitimate source for the quote investigated here that you want to contribute, I'm interested!

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Addendum

When researching this quote, I saw a person on Reddit suggest that the quote was by Winston Churchill! I found zero evidence of that. However, I found a page which listed a Churchill quote, followed by the "Bruce Lee" quote. If someone searched for the quote and saw a snippet in the search results, Churchill's name might appear before it. That could lead a less vigilant user to assume Churchill was the origin.

Updated 26 Oct 2020: I checked three more sources from the Bruce Lee Library and found no matches there either.