Acknowledging that sometimes, often at very crucial times, you really have no idea where you are going or even where the path lies. A same time, you can very well know something about where you are now (even if it is knowing that you are lost, confused, enraged or without hope).

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

After all, if you really aren't trying to get anywhere else at this moment, patience takes care of itself.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Another way to look at meditation is to view the process of thinking itself as a waterfall, a continual cascading of thought. In cultivating mindfulness we are going beyond or behind our thinking, much the way you might find a vantage point in a cave or depression in a rock behind a waterfall. We still see and hear the water, but we are out of the torrent.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

Awareness is not the same as thought. It lies beyond thinking, although it makes use of thinking, honoring its value and its power. Awareness is more like a vessel which can hold and contain our thinking, helping us to see and know our thoughts as thoughts rather than getting caught up in them in reality.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

...but we're not being educated in how to be, only in how to accomplish. So it's all about acquisition, about getting stuff we don't have... As soon as you realize it's a thought pattern, you can write yourself a restraining order.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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 constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves.

— Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

— Jon Kabat-Zinn