- Grandmaster Brendan Lai (7th Generation Northern Praying Mantis, Wong Hon Funn Lineage)-
Except from an article in Inside Kung Fu Magazine 1972

The cycle starts with us knowing nothing.
After one or two years, we begin to pick up some knowledge and we think that we know something.
In another two years, the more we know, the more we begin to have doubts whether we know anything. With two more years of advanced training, we are convinced that we know nothing.
We are going back to where we began. We realize that knowledge is so tremendous, like a bottomless sea,
a topless mountain, with the universe as its limits. When we start, we are cocky, thinking that we know quite a bit, and we want to go out and beat people up to show off and prove to others how good our skills are.
At the end of the training, we know that we are like a little grain of sand on the beach.
This is where the perfect character comes into it, and we become more humble,
knowing always that there is somebody better than we are, knowing that there are no bounds to knowledge,
knowing that we are but a drop of water in the ocean.
When we go out into the world, we will treat everyone nicely, knowing that we are nothing but nothing.”