Top 180 Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “One very important domain of our lives and experience that we tend to miss, ignore, abuse, or lose control of as a result of being in the automatic pilot mode is our own body.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

102. “For men and women alike, this journey is a the trajectory between birth and death, a human life lived. No one escapes the adventure. We only work with it differently.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

103. “It helps to have a focus for your attention, an anchor line to tether you to the present moment and to guide you back when the mind wanders. The breath serves this purpose exceedingly well. It can be a true ally. Bringing awareness to our breathing, we remind ourselves that we are here now, so we might as well be fully awake for whatever is already happening.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

104. “Peace is something that we can bring about if we can actually learn to wake up a bit more as individuals and a lot more as a species; if we can learn to be fully what we actually already are; to reside in the inherent potential of what is possible for us, being human.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

105. “Discipline provides a constancy which is independent of what kind of day you had yesterday and what kind of day you anticipate today.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

106. “When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

107. “Awareness Is Not The Same As ThoughtMore Like A Vessel Which Can Hold And Contain Our Thinking.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

108. “If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things, This is the best season of your life. WU-MEN.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

109. “Socrates was famous in Athens for saying, “Know thyself.” It is said that one of his students said to him: “Socrates, you go around saying ‘Know thyself,’ but do you know yourself?” Socrates was said to have replied, “No, but I understand something about this not knowing.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

110. “I was very much a tough New York street kid. I went to a school where you had to learn how to get along with everybody or fight with everybody, and I did my fair share of both.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

111. “Most people think that to meditate, I should feel a particular special something, and if I don’t, then I must be doing something wrong.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

112. “Seven attitudinal factors constitute the major pillars of mindfulness practice as we teach it in MBSR. They are non-judging, patience, a beginner’s mind, trust, non-striving, acceptance, and letting go.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

113. “It is healing simply to be heard, to be met, to be seen, to be known.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

114. “When experience is viewed in a certain way, it presents nothing but doorways into the soul.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

115. “There is a price we pay for being attached to a narrow view of being “right.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

116. “We call the effort to cultivate our ability to be in the present moment ‘practice’ or ‘meditation practice.’”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

117. “When asked about his apparent lack of anger toward the Chinese by an incredulous reporter at the time he won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Dalai Lama replied something to the effect that: “They have taken everything from us; should I let them take my mind as well?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

118. “Because of this inner busyness, which is going on almost all the time, we are liable either to miss a lot of the texture of our life experience or to discount its value and meaning.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

119. “Experiment with giving away this energy – in little ways at first – directing it toward yourself and toward others with no thought of gain or return. Give more than you think you can, trusting that you are richer than you think. Celebrate this richness. Give as if you had inexhaustible wealth. This is called “kingly giving.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

120. “If you can’t entirely trust what you think, what about trusting awareness? What about trusting your heart? What about trusting your motivation to at least do no harm? What about trusting your experience until it’s proven to be inaccurate – and then trusting that discovery?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

121. “When I was talking to a reporter, she said, “Oh, you mean to live for the moment.” I said, “No, it isn’t that. That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean to live in the moment.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

122. “Engel’s biopsychosocial model proposed that psychological and social factors could either protect a person from illness or increase his or her susceptibility to it. Such factors include a person’s beliefs and attitudes, how supported and loved a person feels by family and friends, the psychological and environmental stresses to which one is exposed, and personal health behaviors.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

123. “There are always waves on the water. Sometimes they are big, sometimes they are small, and sometimes they are almost imperceptible. The water’s waves are churned up by the winds, which come and go and vary in direction and intensity, just as do the winds of stress and change in our lives, which stir up the waves in our minds.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

124. “Be a light unto yourself.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

125. “By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

126. “Remember, now is the only time you have for anything. You have to accept yourself as you are before you can really change. Your choosing to do so becomes an act of self-compassion and intelligence. When.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

127. “If you stop trying to make yourself more than you are, out of fear that you are less than you are, whoever you really are will be a lot lighter and happier and easier to live with, too.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

128. “You can’t sail straight into the wind, and if you only know how to sail with the wind at your back, you will only go where the wind blows you. But if you know how to use the wind’s energy and are patient, you can sometimes get where you want to go. You can still be in control.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

129. “One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them of just your thought about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like dream glasses. When we have them on, we see dream children, dream husband, dream wife, dream ob, dream colleagues, dream partners, dream friends. We can live in a dream present for a dream future... But if we take off the glasses, maybe, just maybe, we might see a little more accurately what is actually here.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

130. “Can we be in touch with our own life unfolding? Can we rise to the occasion of our own humanity? Can we take on the challenges we meet, even seeking them out to test ourselves, to grow, to act in a principled way, to be true to ourselves, to find our own way, and ultimately not only have it but, more importantly, live it?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

131. “When we commit ourselves to paying attention in an open way, without falling prey to our own likes and dislikes, opinions and prejudices, projections and expectations, new possibilities open up and we have a chance to free ourselves from the straitjacket of unconsciousness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

132. “Meditation is neither shutting things out nor off. It is seeing things clearly, and deliberately positioning yourself differently in relationship to them.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

133. “If we hope to go anywhere or develop ourselves in any way, we can only step from where we are standing. If we don’t really know where we are standing... We may only go in circles...”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

134. “Whether we are basically healthy at the moment or have a terminal illness, none of us knows how long we have to live. Life only unfolds in moments. The healing power of mindfulness lies in living each of those moments as fully as we can, accepting it as it is as we open to what comes next – in the next moment of now.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

135. “We all have limitations. They are worth befriending. They teach us a lot. They can show us what we most need to pay attention to and honor. They become our cutting edge for learning and growing and gentling ourselves into the present moment as it is.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

136. “Don’t go outside your house to see the flowers. My friend, don’t bother with that excursion. Inside your body there are flowers. One flower has a thousand petals. That will do for a place to sit.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

137. “Thich Nhat Hanh, the venerable and highly respected Vietnamese meditation teacher, poet, and peace activist, uses the image of cloudy apple juice settling in a glass to describe meditation. You just sit with whatever is present, even discomfort, anxiety, or confusion, with whatever is present, and the mind settles all by itself.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

138. “On the radio, I heard someone define ethics as “obedience to the unenforceable.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

139. “Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

140. “Mindful sitting meditation is not an attempt to escape from problems or difficulties into some cut-off “meditative” state of absorption or denial. On the contrary, it is a willingness to go nose to nose with pain, confusion, and loss, if that is what is dominating the present moment, and to stay with the observing over a sustained period of time, beyond thinking.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

141. “The only way you can do anything of value is to have the effort come out of non-doing and to let go of caring whether it will be of use or not. Otherwise, self-involvement and greediness can sneak in and distort your relationship to the work, or the work itself, so that it is off in some way, biased, impure, and ultimately not completely satisfying, even if it is good.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

142. “The challenge of mindfulness is to work with the very circumstances that you find yourself in – no matter how unpleasant, how discouraging, how limited, how unending and stuck they may appear to be – and to make sure that you have done everything in your power to use their energies to transform yourself before you decide to cut your losses and move on.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

143. “The only way we have of influencing the future is to own the present, however we find it.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

144. “There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become your teacher.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

145. “Everything is related to everything else and, in a way, simultaneously contains everything else and is contained by everything else. What is more, everything is in flux.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

146. “Anybody who is imitating somebody else, no matter who it us, is heading in the wrong direction. It is impossible to become like somebody else. Your only hope is to become more fully yourself.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

147. “Meditation is a way of being, not a technique. Meditation is not about trying to get anywhere else. It is about allowing yourself to be exactly where you are and as you are, and the world to be exactly as it is in this moment, as well.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

148. “Non-doing simply means letting things be and allowing them to unfold in their own way.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

149. “It’s not that God, the environment, and other people cannot help us to be happy or find satisfaction. It’s just that our happiness, satisfaction, and our understanding, even of God, will be no deeper than our capacity to know ourselves inwardly, to encounter the world from the deep comfort that comes from being at home in one’s own skin, from an intimate familiarity with the ways of one’s own mind and body.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

150. “One world is aware, and by far the largest to me, and that is myself, And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years, I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait. WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn