Top 45 Kung Fu Quotes

I don’t mind doing action or kung fu, but I’m also really happy to do something dramatic. I’d like to show that a Chinese girl doesn’t have to do crazy martial arts to get the part.

If all young actors want is to star in romances, what do they need to learn kung fu for?

The best part of watching kung fu movies with my dad was the conversations they sparked. We never watched them just for fun. ‘Do you see how good his balance is?’ My dad would always zero in on really specific stuff like that. Everything had a potential lesson.

Growing up, all of my friends would set their schedules to the showing of kung fu movies on TV.

I’ve been traveling the world picking up new moves, kind of like David Carradine walking the earth in ‘Kung Fu’ though I hope things turn out a little better for me than they did for him.

Qing Cheng Mountain was a direct influence on the mysterious final shot of ‘Kung Fu Panda 2.’

I was involved in a web cartoon of Kung Fu with WB a few years back.

But the funny thing is, I broke my finger not on set doing kung fu. I broke my finger when I fell down the stairs prior to going on set.

I have never planned anything. ‘Kung Fu Yoga’ was also never planned or anything.

My producer for the first ‘Kung Fu Panda’ movie, Melissa Cobb, is an amazing woman. She’s supersmart and helps push everyone – male, female, anyone – to do their best.

I want to make a good, solid kung fu movie.

Actually, for me, I really love to do action movie. You know, most people, they know, they thought that I am a martial artist. I don’t know why, but I love to do kung fu movie, you know?

When I was a kid, I loved watching kung fu movies – in San Francisco, we had ‘Kung Fu Theater’ on TV on Saturdays, and they’d air old Shaw Brothers movies with English dubbing, things like that.

People would come to me and say, ‘Jet, your Kung Fu is pretty good, do you want to be an action star when you grow up?’ At 17, I was given the script and I went to make the movie.

I throw it all in there, Kung Fu, blaxploitation, horror.

I’ve started meditation. I even train in Kung Fu. I’m into my juicing, my healthy eating – my whole lifestyle has taken a massive turn.

I don’t need to convince anybody that I know kung fu, but maybe somebody needs to know that I really can act, without doing a Chinese accent or a funny walk.

Kung fu: You’ve got to spend your whole life at it before you’re kung fu.

I did kung fu up until two weeks before Benjamin was born, and yoga three days a week. I think a lot of people get pregnant and decide they can turn into garbage disposals. I was mindful about what I ate, and I gained only 30 pounds.

I started training judo when I was 5 years old. I didn’t know much. My mom just took me and my brother to do some judo because we were very energetic. We did that for a couple of years. I don’t know why we stopped, but I came back to try other forms of martial arts like kung fu and karate when I was 12 and never stopped.

Well, my dad did a lot of Kung Fu when I was growing up, so he taught me a lot about mental toughness. Ways to slow your heart rate down, slow your breathing down to take control of your body so you can push yourself to the next limit.

When we were first creating the look of ‘Kung Fu Panda,’ we wanted to pay tribute to the beautiful tradition and culture of China.

When I was a kid, I would make kung fu movies with the kids in the neighborhood, and I would be the guy behind the camera directing everybody, but they were all very silly little shorts and comedy bits.

I do kung fu. I box. I ride horses. I like to race cars in a crazy way.

I grew up in a kung fu house. It wasn’t until I got older that I discovered that most families didn’t talk about the Shaolin Temple or Jackie Chan at the dinner table.

In most kung fu films, they want to create a hero who’s always fighting a bad guy. In the story of Ip Man, he’s not fighting physical opponents. He’s fighting the ups and downs of his life.

In my research, I learned that the Boxers’ kung fu wasn’t all that formalized. The vast majority of them didn’t belong to some age-old martial arts tradition. They were basically poor, starving teenagers doing the best they could to figure out how to fight, relying more on their mystical beliefs than formal training.

Our love of kung fu goes back to the Bruce Lee days in the 1970s. Outside the action, we loved the interesting, heartfelt stories and the dialogue. It was RZA’s idea to draw all that in there as samples.

I was mugged when I was 12. I had a portable radio, and I ran into this building and these two guys came in and hit me, busted me up and took the radio. After that I was very paranoid and I started taking kung fu and karate. But I didn’t want to fight.

Pre-‘Tokyo Drift,’ I was like: ‘Am I gonna play Yakuza #1 and Chinese Waiter #2 for the rest of my life? Is America even ready for an Asian face that speaks English, that doesn’t do Kung Fu?’

There is a reason why kung fu caught fire and the world became obsessed with it, because it’s incredible to watch.

Well I grew up following most of the major titles like ‘Fantastic Four,’ ‘Spider-Man,’ ‘Avengers,’ etc. But I had also a lot of love for the smaller titles like ‘Master of Kung Fu,’ ‘Black Panther,’ ‘The Defenders,’ ‘Inhumans,’ and of course Power-Man and Iron Fist.’

I liked the first ‘Kung Fu Panda.’

‘Kung Fu’ was never cancelled; I just left. I decided I had enough of it, and I thought I should do a movie right away, because I think when you leave a television series, it’s important that you establish the fact that you’re a movie actor really quickly, or you might never get that chance.

Come to think of it, some of the most special films in my career were ‘City Of Life’ and ‘Happy New Year.’ For both these films, I stayed over a month in Dubai and just when I was thinking that I need one more film like that, that’s when ‘Kung Fu Yoga’ happened.

I do a combination of running and kung fu on a regular basis.

I’ve never done this level of physical preparation for something. Particularly for ‘Rogue One’ where I was training every day and doing kung fu rehearsals on a daily basis. But that’s part of the reason I wanted to do it, because it was very different from what I’ve done before.

I need something to do when I’m not working, or I crawl up the walls. So I’ve just taken up kung fu. I was looking for some kind of calming, relaxing activity. I tried yoga, but it wasn’t really me.

I was a hyperactive kid, and it took awhile for me to find the right teacher. My master was a Shaolin kung fu teacher, but he also taught tai chi, Chinese medicine, brush painting – he was adept at all facets of Chinese culture.

He was never a kung fu guy. Now, he’s Mr. Kung Fu. Oh, man. Even Chow Yun-Fat gets typed!

Kung fu and soccer are the two things that I was most interested in as a child.

To make a kung fu film is like a dream come true, because I’m a big fan of kung fu movies and I’m learning kung fu for a long time.

We saw David Carradine, who is not of Asian descent, playing an Asian man on the show ‘Kung Fu’ that originally should have, and was developed for, Bruce Lee. To have that be the legacy that quote-unquote inspired ‘Shang-Chi’ in the beginning obviously doesn’t put us off to a great start.

My role in kung fu – in the art of kung fu, not the series – is not as a practitioner. My role is that of an evangelist, which is an entirely different thing.

Prior to ‘Tokyo Drift,’ the iconic perception of Asians in Hollywood films has been either the Kung Fu guy, the Yakuza guy or some technical genius. It used to be such a joke, to be laughed at rather than with.