Top 180 Daniel Goleman Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “CEOs are hired for their intellect and business expertise – and fired for a lack of emotional intelligence.”

— Daniel Goleman

Featured in: Leadership Quotes, Emotion Quotes, Intelligence Quotes

2. “The best leaders don’t know just one style of leadership – they’re skilled at several, and have the flexibility to switch between styles as the circumstances dictate.”

— Daniel Goleman

3. “IQ and technical skills are important, but Emotional Intelligence is the Sine Qua Non of Leadership.”

— Daniel Goleman

4. “Positive work environments outperform negative work environments.”

— Daniel Goleman

Featured in: Friday Quotes for Work

5. “As much as 80% of adult “success” comes from EQ.”

— Daniel Goleman

6. “Empathy and social skills are social intelligence, the interpersonal part of emotional intelligence. That’s why they look alike.”

— Daniel Goleman

Featured in: Psychology Quotes, Empathy Quotes, Intelligence Quotes

7. “Gifted leadership occurs when heart and head – feeling and thought – meet. These are the two winds that allow a leader to soar.”

— Daniel Goleman

8. “When we focus on others, our world expands.”

— Daniel Goleman

9. “Emotional self-awareness is the building block of the next fundamental emotional intelligence: being able to shake off a bad mood.”

— Daniel Goleman

10. “In a very real sense we have two minds, one that thinks and one that feels.”

— Daniel Goleman

11. “Happy, calm children learn best.”

— Daniel Goleman

12. “Research shows that for jobs of all kinds, emotional intelligence is twice as important an ingredient of outstanding performance as cognitive ability and technical skill combined.”

— Daniel Goleman

13. “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”

— Daniel Goleman

14. “In a high-IQ job pool, soft skills like discipline, drive and empathy mark those who emerge as outstanding.”

— Daniel Goleman

15. “True compassion means not only feeling another’s pain but also being moved to help relieve it.”

— Daniel Goleman

16. “Leaders with empathy do more than sympathize with people around them: they use their knowledge to improve their companies in subtle, but important ways.”

— Daniel Goleman

17. “Emotional self-control – delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness- underlies accomplishment of every sort.”

— Daniel Goleman

18. “Emotional intelligence begins to develop in the earliest years. All the small exchanges children have with their parents, teachers, and with each other carry emotional messages.”

— Daniel Goleman

19. “The emotional brain responds to an event more quickly than the thinking brain.”

— Daniel Goleman

20. “One way to boost our will power and focus is to manage our distractions instead of letting them manage us.”

— Daniel Goleman

21. “Emotions are contagious. We’ve all known it experientially. You know after you have a really fun coffee with a friend, you feel good. When you have a rude clerk in a store, you walk away feeling bad.”

— Daniel Goleman

Featured in: Fun Quotes, Coffee Quotes

22. “Empathy represents the foundation skill for all the social competencies important for work.”

— Daniel Goleman

23. “What really matters for success, character, happiness and life long achievements is a definite set of emotional skills – your EQ – not just purely cognitive abilities that are measured by conventional IQ tests.”

— Daniel Goleman

24. “Leadership is not domination, but the art of persuading people to work toward a common goal.”

— Daniel Goleman

25. “We learn best with focused attention. As we focus on what we’re learning, the brain maps that information on what we already know making new neural connections.”

— Daniel Goleman

26. “The basic premise that children must learn about emotions is that all feelings are okay to have; however, only some reactions are okay.”

— Daniel Goleman

27. “One aspect of a successful relationship is not just how compatible you are, but how you deal with your incompatibility.”

— Daniel Goleman

28. “Simply paying attention allows us to build an emotional connection. Lacking attention, empathy hasn’t a chance.”

— Daniel Goleman

29. “Scheduling down time as part of your routine is hard but worth it, personally, even professionally.”

— Daniel Goleman

30. “For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.”

— Daniel Goleman

31. “Simple inattention kills empathy, let alone compassion. So the first step in compassion is to notice the other’s need. It all begins with the simple act of attention.”

— Daniel Goleman

32. “Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient – who bounce back right away – can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient.”

— Daniel Goleman

33. “Remember, empathy need not lead to sympathetically giving in to the other side’s demands – knowing how someone feels does not mean agreeing with them.”

— Daniel Goleman

34. “Overloading attention shrinks mental control. Life immersed in digital distractions creates a near constant cognitive overload. And that overload wears out self-control.”

— Daniel Goleman

35. “People learn what they want to learn. If learning is forced on us, even if we master it temporarily, it is soon forgotten.”

— Daniel Goleman

36. “Life without passion would be a dull wasteland of neutrality, cut off and isolated from the richness of life itself.”

— Daniel Goleman

37. “Our emotional mind will harness the rational mind to its purposes, for our feelings and reactions – rationalizations – justifying them in terms of the present moment, without realizing the influence of our emotional memory.”

— Daniel Goleman

38. “Anyone can become angry – that is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way – this is not easy. ARISTOTLE, The Nicomachean Ethics.”

— Daniel Goleman

39. “The more socially intelligent you are, the happier and more robust and more enjoyable your relationships will be.”

— Daniel Goleman

40. “The amygdala in the emotional center sees and hears everything that occurs to us instantaneously and is the trigger point for the fight or flight response.”

— Daniel Goleman

41. “Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership.”

— Daniel Goleman

42. “Great leaders, the research shows, are made as they gradually acquire, in the course of their lives and careers, the competencies that make them so effective. The competencies can be learned by any leader, at any point.”

— Daniel Goleman

43. “When the eyes of a woman that a man finds attractive look directly at him, his brain secretes the pleasure-inducing chemical dopamine – but not when she looks elsewhere.”

— Daniel Goleman

44. “Empathic, emotionally intelligent work environments have a good track record of increasing creativity, improving problem solving and raising productivity.”

— Daniel Goleman

45. “Well, any effort to maximize your potential and ability is a good thing.”

— Daniel Goleman

46. “Attention is a little-noticed and underrated mental asset.”

— Daniel Goleman

47. “For the High Achievers, Studying Gave Them The Pleasing, Absorbing Challenge of Flow Percent of the Hours They Spent as It.”

— Daniel Goleman

48. “Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings. This is part of teaching emotional literacy – a set of skills we can all develop, including the ability to read, understand, and respond appropriately to one’s own emotions and the emotions of others.”

— Daniel Goleman

49. “The more time you put into practicing, then, the greater the payoff.”

— Daniel Goleman

50. “The near cousin of optimism is hope: knowing the steps needed to get to a goal and having the energy to pursue those steps. It is a primal motivating force, and its absence is paralyzing.”

— Daniel Goleman