Famous Quotes & Sayings

Jon Kabat-Zinn

He who dies before he dies does not die when he dies.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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

To let go means to give up coercing, resisting, or struggling, in exchange for something more powerful and wholesome which comes out of allowing things to be as they are without getting caught up in your attraction to or rejection of them, in the intrinsic stickiness of wanting, of liking and disliking.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Maybe the fear is that we are less than we think we are, when the actuality of it is that we are much much more.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

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

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

Jon Kabat-Zinn

You are only here now; you're only alive in this moment.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

Meditation is the only intentional, systematic human activity which at bottom is about not trying to improve yourself or get anywhere else, but simply to realize where you already are.

Jon Kabat-Zinn

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

The little things? The little moments? They aren't little.

Joko Beck

What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities. Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It is beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don't really know each other; they are one image living with another image....

Joko Beck

Meditation practice is simply moving from a life of hurting myself and others to a life of not hurting myself and others.

Joko Beck

Life always gives us exactly the teacher we need at every moment. This includes every mosquito, every misfortune, every red light, every traffic jam, every obnoxious supervisor (or employee), every illness, every loss, every moment of joy or depression, every addiction, every piece of garbage, every breath. Every moment is the guru.

John Zorn

I put together the influences of my life in as clear a way as I possibly can, in the same way that Beethoven or Schoenberg or Bach put their influences together.

Luigi Pirandello

The secret of living is to find a pivot, the pivot of a concept on which you can make your stand.

Luigi Pirandello

Every true man, sir, who is a little above the level of the beasts and plants does not live for the sake of living, without knowing how to live; but he lives so as to give a meaning and a value of his own to life.

Luigi Pirandello

Life is full of strange absurdities, which, strangely enough, do not even need to appear plausible, since they are true.

Ludwig van Beethoven

An artist is someone who has learned to trust in himself.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

The eternal life is given to those who live in the present.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

A confession has to be part of your new life.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Every sign by itself seems dead. What gives it life?--In use it is alive. Is life breathed into it there?--Or is the use its life?

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who live in the present.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse's good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment.

Luc de Clapiers

The shortness of life cannot dissuade us from its pleasures, nor console us for its pains.

Luc de Clapiers

To achieve great things we must live as though we were never going to die.

Luc de Clapiers

To execute great things, one should live as though one would never die.

Louis Nizer

A father is a thousand schoolmasters.

Louis Pasteur

In matters of observation chance favors only the prepared mind. (not literal translation) - Dan's les champs de observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits prepares.

Louis Pasteur

After death, life reappears in a different form and with different laws. It is inscribed in the laws of the permanence of life on the surface of the earth and everything that has been a plant and an animal will be destroyed and transformed into a gaseous, volatile and mineral substance.

John Connolly

If 'why' was the first and last question, then because I was curious to see what would happen was the first and last answer. A version of it had been spoken to God Himself in the Garden of Eden, and it was destined to be the reason for the end of things at the hands of man.