MISATTRIBUTED
Do not pray for an easy life, pray for the strength to endure a difficult one.
Misattributed
Widely shared under this name, but not theirs.
This quote is commonly circulated under the author's name, but it does not appear in their known works. The true origin is unconfirmed — likely a later paraphrase.
Source
Phillips Brooks, "Going up to Jerusalem," Twenty Sermons (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1886), p. 330.
Editorial Note
These words carry a real and traceable lineage, but it does not begin with Bruce Lee. The line is a modern condensation of a passage by the American clergyman Phillips Brooks, from his sermon "Going up to Jerusalem" in Twenty Sermons (1886): "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." President John F. Kennedy read those lines aloud, crediting Brooks by name, at the Presidential Prayer Breakfast on February 7, 1963, nearly a decade before Lee's death. The opening of the version now attached to Lee, "Do not pray for an easy life," reproduces Brooks almost exactly, and the remainder compresses his "pray for powers equal to your tasks" into "pray for the strength to endure a difficult one."
The attribution to Lee cannot be sourced to anything he wrote or said. The authenticated record of his work, including the notebooks and letters edited by John Little, does not contain this line, and its register is foreign to it. Lee, who was not a religious man, does not cast his philosophy in the language of prayer anywhere in that record, and the vocabulary of the quote does not appear in his own reflections. The earliest traceable appearance of the line under his name is online, around 2007, more than three decades after he died in 1973, on user-editable quotation pages of the kind where a resonant thought and a beloved name are easily joined.
None of this diminishes Lee, or those who keep his memory. The sentiment sits naturally beside his philosophy of strength through adversity, which is exactly why it attached to him so readily and why it has been carried in good faith, the Bruce Lee Family Company among them, whose own writing has embraced and interpreted the line as his. But a thought fitting a person is not evidence that the person composed it. The documented author of the formula is Phillips Brooks, printed in Twenty Sermons in 1886 and read into the public record by President Kennedy in 1963, and absent any primary source in Lee's own hand, we record this as misattributed to Bruce Lee and correctly credited, in its original form, to Brooks.
The attribution to Lee cannot be sourced to anything he wrote or said. The authenticated record of his work, including the notebooks and letters edited by John Little, does not contain this line, and its register is foreign to it. Lee, who was not a religious man, does not cast his philosophy in the language of prayer anywhere in that record, and the vocabulary of the quote does not appear in his own reflections. The earliest traceable appearance of the line under his name is online, around 2007, more than three decades after he died in 1973, on user-editable quotation pages of the kind where a resonant thought and a beloved name are easily joined.
None of this diminishes Lee, or those who keep his memory. The sentiment sits naturally beside his philosophy of strength through adversity, which is exactly why it attached to him so readily and why it has been carried in good faith, the Bruce Lee Family Company among them, whose own writing has embraced and interpreted the line as his. But a thought fitting a person is not evidence that the person composed it. The documented author of the formula is Phillips Brooks, printed in Twenty Sermons in 1886 and read into the public record by President Kennedy in 1963, and absent any primary source in Lee's own hand, we record this as misattributed to Bruce Lee and correctly credited, in its original form, to Brooks.
