Top 180 Jon Kabat-Zinn Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “There are a lot of different ways to talk about mindfulness, but what it really means is awareness.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

102. “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

103. “When you have children, you realize how easy it is to not see them fully, and perhaps miss all those early years. If you are not careful, you can be too absorbed in work, and they will be only too happy to tell you about it later. Being a parent is one of greatest mindfulness practices of all.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

104. “Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God? He is the breath inside the breath. KABIR.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

105. “Be a light unto yourself.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

106. “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

107. “Guess what? When it comes right down to it, wherever you go, there you are. Whatever you wind up doing, that’s what you’ve wound up doing. Whatever you are thinking right now, that’s what’s on your mind. Whatever has happened to you, it has already happened. The important question is, how are you going to handle it? In other words, “Now what?”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

108. “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

109. “When we spend some time each day in non-doing, resting in awareness, observing the flow of the breath and the activity of our mind and body without getting caught up in that activity, we are cultivating calmness and mindfulness hand in hand.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

117. “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

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

119. “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

120. “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

121. “There are no drugs that will make you immune to stress or to pain or that will by themselves magically solve your life’s problems or promote healing. It will take conscious effort on your part to move in a direction of healing and inner peace. This means learning to work with the very stress and pain that is causing you to suffer.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

123. “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

124. “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

125. “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

126. “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

127. “Embody what you most want to impart, and keep your mouth shut.”

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

128. “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

129. “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

130. “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

131. “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

132. “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

133. “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

134. “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

135. “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

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. “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

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

141. “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

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 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

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

145. “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

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

148. “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

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. “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