Top 180 Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

2. “Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

3. “Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Featured in: Mindfulness Quotes

4. “The little things? The little moments? They aren’t little.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

5. “We take care of the future best by taking care of the present now.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

6. “It is indeed a radical act of love just to sit down and be quiet for a time by yourself.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

7. “Patience is a form of wisdom. It demonstrates that we understand and accept the fact that sometimes things must unfold in their own time.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Featured in: Quotes About Facts

8. “Mindfulness is about being fully awake in our lives. It is about perceiving the exquisite vividness of each moment. We also gain immediate access to our own powerful inner resources for insight, transformation, and healing.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

9. “Mindfulness is a way of paying attention, on purpose and non-judgmentally, to what goes on in the present moment in your body, mind and the world around you.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

10. “Mindfulness practice means that we commit fully in each moment to be present; inviting ourselves to interface with this moment in full awareness, with the intention to embody as best we can an orientation of calmness, mindfulness, and equanimity right here and right now.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

11. “All the suffering, stress, and addiction comes from not realizing you already are what you are looking for.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

12. “Mindfulness means moment-to-moment, non-judgmental awareness. It is cultivated by refining our capacity to pay attention, intentionally, in the present moment, and then sustaining that attention over time as best we can. In the process, we become more in touch with our life as it is unfolding.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

13. “Mindfulness is about love and loving life. When you cultivate this love, it gives you clarity and compassion for life, and your actions happen in accordance with that.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

14. “Mindfulness meditation is the embrace of any and all mind states in awareness, without preferring one to another.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

15. “Mindful parenting is the hardest job on the planet, but it’s also one that has the potential for the deepest kinds of satisfactions over the life span, and the greatest feelings of interconnectedness and community and belonging.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

16. “Practice moment to moment non-judgemental awareness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

17. “You are only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

18. “In letting go of wanting something special to occur, maybe we can realize that something special is already occurring.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

19. “Voluntary simplicity means going fewer places in one day rather than more, seeing less so I can see more, doing less so I can do more, acquiring less so I can have more.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

20. “When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

21. “Practice sharing the fullness of your being, your best self, your enthusiasm, your vitality, your spirit, your trust, your openness, above all, your presence. Share it with yourself, with your family, with the world.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Featured in: Practice Quotes

22. “Healing is a coming to terms with things as they are, rather than struggling to force them to be as they once were, or as we would like them to be, to feel secure or to have what we sometimes think of as our own way.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

23. “The best way to capture moments is to pay attention. This is how we cultivate mindfulness. Mindfulness means being awake. It means knowing what you are doing.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

24. “The real meditation practice is how we live our lives from moment to moment to moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

25. “Note that this journey is uniquely yours, no one else’s. So the path has to be your own. You cannot imitate somebody else’s journey and still be true to yourself. Are you prepared to honor your uniqueness in this way?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

26. “Mindfulness is not about getting anywhere else.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

27. “He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

28. “Zen has an expression, “nothing special.” When you understand “nothing special,” you realize that everything is special. Everything’s special and nothing’s special. Everything’s spiritual and nothing’s spiritual. It’s how you see, it’s what eyes you’re looking through, that matters.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

29. “In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

30. “Arriving someplace more desirable at some future time is an illusion. This is it.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

31. “Intelligence is the door to freedom and alert attention is the mother of intelligence.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

32. “Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

33. “So, in meditation practice, the best way to get somewhere is to let go of trying to get anywhere at all.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

34. “Meditation is simply about being yourself and know about who that is.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

35. “Make a list of what is really important to you. Embody it.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

36. “Perhaps the most “spiritual” thing any of us can do is simply to look through our own eyes, see with eyes of wholeness, and act with integrity and kindness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

37. “The only time you ever have in which to learn anything or see anything or feel anything, or express any feeling or emotion, or respond to an event, or grow, or heal, is this moment, because this is the only moment any of us ever gets. You’re only here now; you’re only alive in this moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

38. “You are whole and also part of larger and larger circles of wholeness you many not even know about. You are never alone. And you already belong. You belong to humanity. You belong to life. You belong to this moment, this breath.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

39. “Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

40. “Nourishing the soul is the process of drinking at the life stream, coming back to one’s true self, embracing the whole of one’s experience – good, bad, or ugly; painful or exalted; dull or boring.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

41. “Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable. Without calmness, the mirror of mindfulness will have an agitated and choppy surface and will not be able to reflect things with any accuracy.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

42. “You might be tempted to avoid the messiness of daily living for the tranquility of stillness and peacefulness. This of course would be an attachment to stillness, and like any strong attachment, it leads to delusion. It arrests development and short-circuits the cultivation of wisdom.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

43. “In any given moment we are either practicing mindfulness, or defacto, we are practicing mindlessness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

44. “Stillness, insight, and wisdom arise only when we can settle into being complete in this moment, without having to seek or hold on to or reject anything.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

45. “Writing can be an incredible mindfulness practice.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

46. “The awareness is not part of the darkness or the pain; it holds the pain, and knows it, so it has to be more fundamental, and closer to what is healthy and strong and golden within you.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

47. “The mind that has not been developed or trained is very scattered. That’s the normal state of affairs, but it leaves us out of touch with a great deal in life, including our bodies.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

48. “If we are honest with ourselves, most of us will have to admit that we live out our lives in an ocean of fear.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

49. “Mindfulness is so powerful that the fact that it comes out of Buddhism is irrelevant.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

50. “It’s not a matter of letting go – you would if you could. Instead of “Let it go,” we should probably say “Let it be.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn