Brazilian Jiu Jitsu Quotes

If you want to be a lion, you must train with lions.

We must not learn to try harder. The key is to learn how not to try in the first place.

I can think of no more worthwhile aim than pursuing mastery in this craft while transcending one's own limitations.

There is no losing in jiu jitsu. You either win or you learn.

Any advanced student will tell you the best way to recover guard is simply not to get your guard passed in the first place.

In Jiu Jitsu, we often fall into the trap of simply trying a technique "harder," rather than recognizing that it is a poorly chosen tool for the task at hand.

Jiu-Jitsu is just an excuse Brazilians came up with to hug people for a few hours a day.

We seek to understand Jiu Jitsu as a vehicle to understand ourselves. We have different explicit goals, from getting in shape, learning self-defense or competition, but tacitly we all seek mastery of ourselves.

Jiu Jitsu forges friendships in a way I’ve never known. Being involved in an art as intimate as this, where bodily connection is a must, the common cultural boundaries of personal space are broken. You will never see more hugs, high fives, and physical expressions of love than on the mats. Ultimately, this proves to be one of the most fulfilling aspects of our pursuit of mastery. Along the way, we learn to love others as we love ourselves.

Imagine a true master of the art, someone with complete skill in every aspect of Jiu Jitsu. This master would not force anything. He would simply allow the roll to take whatever form it does, and in every position would act in the most efficient way based off what the circumstance dictates, and not what he himself prefers.

If Jiu Jitsu does not make you a better father, son, mother, daughter, wife or husband, you are missing the point. If Jiu Jitsu does not leave you viewing strangers in a kinder light, you are missing the point. If you are not better equipped to deal with the vicissitudes of life due to your training, then you are not really training.

My four things I care about are truth, meaning, fitness and grace. [...] Sam [Harris] would like to make an argument that the better and more rational our thinking is, the more it can do everything that religion once did. [...] I think about my personal physics hero, Dirac – who was the guy who came up with the equation for the electron, less well-known than the Einstein equations but arguably even more beautiful...in order to predict that, he needed a positively-charged and a negatively-charged particle, and the only two known at the time were the electron and the proton to make up, let's say, a hydrogen atom. Well, the proton is quite a bit heavier than the electron and so he told the story that wasn't really true, where the proton was the anti-particle of the electron, and Heisenberg pointed out that that couldn't be because the masses are too far off and they have to be equal. Well, a short time later, the anti-electron -- the positron, that is -- was found, I guess by Anderson at Caltech in the early 30s and then an anti-proton was created some time later. So it turned out that the story had more meaning than the exact version of the story...so the story was sort of more true than the version of the story that was originally told. And I could tell you a similar story with Einstein, I could tell it to you with Darwin, who, you know, didn't fully understand the implications of his theory, as is evidenced by his screwing up a particular kind of orchid in his later work...not understanding that his theory completely explained that orchid! So there's all sorts of ways in which we get the...the truth wrong the first several times we try it, but the meaning of the story that we tell somehow remains intact. And I think that that's a very difficult lesson for people who just want to say, 'Look, I want to'...you know, Feynman would say, "If an experiment disagrees with you, then you're wrong' and it's a very appealing story to tell to people – but it's also worth noting that Feynman never got a physical law of nature and it may be that he was too wedded to this kind of rude judgment of the unforgiving. Imagine you were innovating in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. The first few times might not actually work. But if you told yourself the story, 'No, no, no – this is actually genius and it's working; no, you just lost three consecutive bouts' -- well, that may give you the ability to eventually perfect the move, perfect the technique, even though you were lying to yourself during the period in which it was being set up. It's a little bit like the difference between scaffolding and a building. And too often, people who are crazy about truth reject scaffolding, which is an intermediate stage in getting to the final truth.

Jiu Jitsu is meant to serve us, not the other way around. It is meant to make you more of whatever it is you already are. It is meant to separate the wheat from the chaff. It is meant to bring to conscious attention all that once went unseen. It is meant to make you more loving. It is meant to make you more wise, but less certain. It is meant to make us humble, yet supremely confident. It is meant to remind us of our frailty while simultaneously making us feel invincible.

Today, it is possible to get a Jiu Jitsu black belt without knowing self-defense or even getting into a real fight. This was impossible during the 1970s and 1980s. Because my father and uncle loudly proclaimed their style 'the world's most effective form of self-defense,' every young Gracie knew that at some point he would be called upon to represent our family in the ring or in the street. Your first official vale tudo fight was like losing your virginity; it was a rite of passage.

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Absolutely, says Steve Maxwell. And with the little device in his pocket, he can prove it. Steve is a former world champion Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter and now a strength-and-conditioning coach who specializes in recovering lost innovations. “The old-timers knew what was up with fascia long before we even had a word for it,” he explains. “You’ll always be safe if you go back to the mighty men of old, the guys before the 1950s. Look at the old gyms, with their Indian clubs and medicine balls. What’s that all about if not balance, range of motion, being fluid, using elastic recoil?

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I have seen far by seeing through the lens of Jiu Jitsu. I have exchanged a great deal of physical health for these insights, and these were trades worth making. My efforts were worth the return. I have sacrificed much in the name of this craft. Not for trophies or belts or prestige. For these fall away like dust. I pursued this art so fervently because it was not actually Jiu Jitsu I pursued. It was myself.

By becoming a black belt, you will become whatever it is you wanted to be in the first place, and Jiu Jitsu will have served its aim.

Through Jiu Jitsu I have developed many of the most meaningful relationships in my life, and if that were the only benefit of my practice, Jiu Jitsu would still be the best endeavor I have ever undertaken.

I wanted to get to the most essential aspect of my being, and look around for a while. I wanted to explore what I am in my most basic self. I wanted to chip away at all of the nonsense I have acquired through my twenty-nine years on this earth. I wanted to find truth. Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats. Jiu Jitsu has peeled the veil of daily life, and has shown me what lies beyond the curtain. We willingly accept the chains that circumstance forces upon us, and we grow to find comfort in them. We attach various fetters of day-to-day living to our being, and we do so with a smile. We accept these constraints for they come in the way of comfort. We accept conformity for it appears the path of least resistance. We strive toward the middle, and we run from ourselves.

We call it training. Not because we are training for Jiu Jitsu. We are training for life.

Jiu Jitsu can be a source of total transparency such as a mirror, but it takes a conscious choice to see what it has to say.

Relationships formed through Jiu Jitsu are deeply rooted in respect for one another, and this is often not the case in matters of modern society.

Autopilot is great, and removal of thought is one of the highest ideals of training. But removal of thought in the moment must be preceded by purposeful thought beforehand.

Have a clear-cut plan on what you wish to improve, and seek opportunities to improve it. The more conscious and honest we can be about our shortcomings, the more strength we will have to improve them. We are going to train hard anyway, we are not going to sweat any more or less. It is simply imperative that the sweat is properly directed.

We must remember that science is a way of using empirical evidence to better understand our world. We are all scientists, just many of us are not very good ones. However, we are all capable of exercising our intellects in a purposeful, linear pursuit of knowledge.

In Jiu Jitsu an inch is a mile, and a second is an eternity. Use each wisely.

All of Jiu Jitsu is finding a way to get your partner to willingly go where you want him to go in the first place.

It appears, at least from my perspective, that each and every position in Jiu Jitsu regardless of the seeming complexity is really governed by no more than a handful of minimum viable products. Pursue to understand these essentials, and you will see that complexity is a myth perpetuated by lack of understanding, and it is this understanding which is possible for each of us.

This is the opportunity the fellowship of Jiu Jitsu affords us. To reach our highest potential of self, and then to offer that self to another.

Jiu Jitsu has shown me that we are not confined to the lot which we inherit. We are not bound to these fetters eternally. They are temporal. We can transcend them should we sincerely choose to. Sincere effort is in fact the rarest virtue among man.

It is fellowship, this most fundamental need on our way toward achieving our highest expression of the human experience, which Jiu Jitsu provides.

Jiu Jitsu provides a place of fellowship that, unfortunately, our society has largely failed to create.

Thoreau went to the woods. I went to the mats.

You are only as strong as your training partners, and your success is dependent on them.

the user puts his feet together and the legs up making the form assume a butterfly-wing shape; thus the name, butterfly guard.

I’ve known what pain is. I’ve had my arm nearly ripped off and have been choked unconscious training Brazilian Jiu Jitsu many times. I’ve broken ankles playing sports and hyperextended my neck in whiplash accidents. Of all the wounds I’ve ever suffered, nothing hurt as much as that short conversation.

Figure 23 The third reason is also very important:

I dare you to find a single exercise, kettlebell or not, that delivers more benefits than the kettlebell swing! Senior RKC instructor Steve Maxwell, a Brazilian Jiu-jitsu World Champion, has flat-out stated that doing the perfect kettlebell swing alone is superior to 99 percent of the sophisticated strength and conditioning programs out there. The swing is exactly what its name implies: a swing of a kettlebell from between your legs up to your chest level. The arms stay straight but loose; the power is generated by the hips. The motion is akin to the standing vertical jump, except the energy is projected into the kettlebell rather than being used to lift the body.

Sometime during the second decade of the twentieth century, a “touring Japanese master” taught the rudiments of a secret, ancient, and scientific system of fighting called “jiu-jitsu” to a sickly Brazilian adolescent named Carlos Gracie, who taught it to his younger brothers, with the possible exception of the youngest, Helio, who taught himself. Meanwhile, Japanese immigrants in Brazil were practicing and teaching a fake form of jiu-jitsu, called “jiu-do” [judo] in order to keep their scientific combat art hidden from foreigners, except for the Gracies, who had already learned real jiu-jitsu from the touring Japanese master and wanted to share their knowledge with other Brazilians. That is the story, at least. Some of it might be true. Some of it probably isn’t.

Gracie jiu-jitsu remained a Brazilian secret until the early 90s, not by design, but because no one outside of Brazil cared.

The Brazilians didn't do what people in the North had come to expect martial artists to do. They didn’t shriek, growl, howl, sneer, or grimace. They didn't fly through the air to smash roofing tiles with their feet, or slice the tops off whiskey bottles with the sides of their hands. They didn't break bricks or blocks of ice with their heads. They didn't chop the horns off of bulls, extinguish candles with ki power, walk across floors covered with rice paper without tearing it, snatch pebbles from the fingers of blind monks, or meditate under mountainside waterfalls in winter. What the Brazilians did do was to easily subdue the martial artists who performed all these impressive but ultimately meaningless feats.

Rorion did for a generation of Brazilians what 30 years previously Brian Epstein did for a generation of English pop musicians, stimulating seemingly limitless demand for a product where none had existed before (Gould, 2007). But Rorion did it to an even greater degree, conceding that his system was basically judo. Helio felt the same way. In one of his last interviews, with Ana Missa on Sensei SporTV in 2009 (February 14), he explained that because he wasn’t physically suited for judo, he “modified jiu-jitsu so that a weak citizen like himself could fight” [pelo meu porte físico eu não podia ser judoka, então eu adaptei o jiu-jitsu para que até um cidadão fraco como eu pudesse lutar]. So there we have it. Gracie Jiu-Jitsu is pre-Olympic judo, taught by Helio’s method, whatever that is, and modified so that weak citizens can fight (apparently Helio felt that judo required too much strength, which is odd, because many of his promotional pictures and demonstrations involved judo throws). That doesn’t mean Gracie products and services aren’t worth what they cost. If judo people were teaching this material, people wouldn’t be paying Brazilians to do it. Rorion didn’t invent anything. What he did was to make it valuable.

Twenty million Brazilians have crawled up out from poverty since Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva became president in 2003. Rorion did not save 20 million Brazilians, but his achievement should not be underestimated. There are a lot of Brazilians making a living from jiu-jitsu who would still be doing construction work (if any work at all), if it hadn’t been for Rorion. And this book wouldn’t have been written.

Jiu-Jitsu teachers differ in their assessment of how many lessons are required to acquire basic self-defense skills. Helio Gracie estimated that about 40 would suffice. Malibu thought 10 would be enough. After that, he said, training is designed to deal with other jiu-jitsu fighters.

Better people don’t beat you with more “advanced” techniques. They just execute the basic techniques better.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu was originally self-defense [defesa pessoal, or auto-defesa], to which was added professional “wrestling” (grappling in a quimono, with rules, for money), which eventually morphed into vale tudo (add striking, subtract quimono). Finally, between 1967 and 1973 the type of sports jiu-jitsu that is now popular was created. Few practitioners engage in vale tudo fights, and most are apathetic about defesa pessoal, but everyone trains sports jiu-jitsu, because that is what almost every training session consist almost exclusively of.

I didn’t know enough about jiu-jitsu history to ask detailed questions. I simply picked up whatever anyone said, and tried to casually follow up on it. My interest was not academic. I was not there to debunk myths, if that’s what they were. I was moderately skeptical about the Gracie myth (having been raised on a diet of Bertrand Russell books), but I was not skeptical about the effectiveness of their grappling system.

If you are called to roll with a jiu-jitsu instructor, rolling means rolling. He may toy with you. He may decline to tap you. But he expects you to do your best to defend yourself and to attack him. When an instructor’s body can no longer do what his mind tells it to, then he does not roll with students in this way, but provides wisdom and leadership appropriate to his rank and age. Students also adjust their intensity level appropriately to the training context. It is not inconceivable that a strong young blue belt could tap Helio Gracie out in 1999. He would pay a high and painful price for the glory of doing it however. There is a reason for age, weight, belt, and gender categories in competitions.

Unlike Kodokan judo, jiu-jitsu does not have a “philosophy.” Jiu-jitsu can be whatever anyone wants it to be, which is the good news, and also the bad news.

Carlos [Gracie Jr.] deserves much of the credit for creating sport Jiu Jitsu, but with it came a problem. it transformed our martial art and created a lot of paper tigers who would never step into the ring to carry the flag of Gracie Jiu Jitsu. My father didn't like the sport version because he thought it was watering down our martial art. Hélio [Gracie] used to say, "This is not my Jiu Jitsu, because competitive Jiu Jitsu is not a martial art. The Jiu Jitsu I created is a martial art so a person can defend themselves on the street without getting beaten up.

Think about a big, strong white belt on his first day of class. What's it like rolling with him? You probably catch him, but up until that point it's kind of crazy, kind of wild and unpredictable. It's different from rolling with a blue belt who may be good and fast but who's mostly doing moves that are recognizable as Jiu-Jitsu. But the thing is, the average guy you fight out in the street is going to be a lot more like the white belt. When you get mounted on a guy like that, you can't rush into things. You have to focus on weathering the storm.

Unless you're currently training to become or stay a top-level competitor, you need to think about Jiu-Jitsu not as a sprint, not even as a marathon, but as a hike you stay on for the rest of your life.

You're allowed to be selective about who you train with, especially as you get older. If you want to stay on the mat for the long haul, you need to be selective.

If you explode and it isn't enough, or it isn't exactly the perfect time, you dump all of this energy that you didn't have to spare and it all comes to nothing.

The whole sport Jiu-Jitsu movement has really confused things. It's really confused what people teach, because a lot of it is based around a competitor's presumed attributes. A competitor—the kind of person who becomes a competitor—is almost certain to be an athlete. He or she is almost certain to be someone who's got some innate athletic ability. Apart from that, they expect that they're going to be in peak physical condition in the tournament, when they're going to be executing these moves. That's the criteria that decides what moves get taught: whether an athlete in peak condition can perform these moves effectively against someone his or her own size. Which is fine—but it isn't most people, and it isn't the context that most people are interested in or concerned about.

There needs to be a sense that everyone is doing Jiu-Jitsu, even the people who are just learning the self-defense. Even the people who never compete. Even the people who only roll with the one or two training partners they know and trust and feel comfortable with. There needs to be a sense that it's all legitimate, that it's all Jiu-Jitsu.

I've heard Rener and other people say that after about the age of forty, every ten years, you lose a ranking in effectiveness when you're rolling. Which is just a fact of nature. We all get older, we all get weaker, we all slow down, we all die.

Jiu Jitsu Woman is a resource and community for women in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. We write articles, guides, and how-to's specifically so women don't have to feel alone in this male dominated sport. Our Women's Club is a subscription group for women who want to hear from the top ranking female BJJ athletes. Every month we have interviews with top ranking female athletes hearing their stories on gender dramas, frustrations, and tips on how they function in such a male dominated industry. We also ask practical questions on how women prepare for tournaments and competitions, and we even talk to men to find out the other sides perspective.

best work with larger opponents is done on the mat. I’ve taken a liking to Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and Judo for situations exactly like these.

When you want to sweep an opponent to your left, move him to your right first to compromise his balance and see what happens. A lot of people call the principle of action and reaction ‘bait & trap’. The idea is to lure your opponent into reacting the way you want, not the other way around.

1. Position 2.​Posture 3.​Pressure 4.​Persistence 5.​Patience 6.​Proper Balance 7.​Precision

At the very start of my grappling career one of the first videos I watched was ‘Choke’, the documentary about Rickson Gracie (if you haven’t seen it you can watch it for free on YouTube - you won’t regret it).

Jiu-Jitsu is like being a Jedi knight… The knowledge is with you all the time - You dream it when you sleep, you can see it walking, it surrounds you. You go out alone, but you are not alone because you have Jiu-Jitsu” - Olavo Abreu

It is up to ourselves to choose, which version of the world, we want to live in. I am only going to live one life here, so I always chose the positive perception.