Chris Matakas, My Mastery: Continued Education Through Jiu Jitsu Quotes

When we honestly take stock of our ability, we are then granted the opportunity to improve our circumstance. Accessing where you stand is the only way to stand somewhere else.

It is in community where we find our very selves.

We strive toward the middle, and we run from ourselves.

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

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.

we must remember that the end of personal mastery is service to others.

In my own life, I have always viewed personal mastery as simply a medium through which I become capable of providing more service toward my fellow man.

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

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.

We are free to live the life we have imagined, not the life imagined for us.

Life is so unlikely, so rare and beautiful an opportunity it is to live, we must be on constant guard to ensure that our actions are worthy of the life it takes to perform them.

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.

The best indicator of a man's philosophy is not what he reads or says, but the way in which he lives his life, the way in which he acts.

Properly directed thoughts result in properly directed actions. The only way to appropriately guide our thoughts is to know their foundation, our values.

I have always found that effort is most easily produced when performed for the benefit of something external to ourselves.

Mastery lies on an infinite continuum, and as a result we will never reach the end. We can, however, see to it that we are as far along that continuum as our circumstance allows.

Your progress as a Jiu Jitsu practitioner is a direct reflection of the standards you have for yourself.

The secular world often finds its constituents disenfranchised and solitary as it has spent a great deal of time debating the religious community while failing to build a true community of its own.

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.

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

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

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.

The point of meditating is not to learn to sit quietly in a room. The point is to live that way in the world.

Words make the intangible aspects of human experience communicable, and a single sentence can shatter our world view and assist us in the formulation of a new one.

Life is easier lived when lived for others.

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

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

I firmly believe that life will continually try to teach you the same lesson, with increasing pain, until you heed the call.

Do not seek victory, for victory in itself will not serve you. Seek to understand what made the victory possible.

An arm bar in a vacuum is worthless. It is the realization of the truths which constitute that arm bar that is the real treasure we seek.

For the sincere student, it mustn't be enough to simply understand Jiu Jitsu. We must seek to understand ourselves.

I believe that which you study is only matched in importance by the sincerity with which you approach it.

There is no concrete way to play Jiu Jitsu, and this is why so many different types of people find joy in it.

Freedom from the thinking mind is our underlying goal for most of human activity.

Being part of the whole, as I grow so does that which contains me.

It is only when we admit our ignorance that we can hope to overcome it.