Top 180 Daniel Goleman Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The most powerful form of nondefensive listening, of course, is empathy: actually hearing the feelings behind what is being said.”

— Daniel Goleman

52. “There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, lead to one or another impulse to act.”

— Daniel Goleman

53. “Whenever we feel stressed out, that’s a signal that our brain is pumping out stress hormones. If sustained over months and years, those hormones can ruin our health and make us a nervous wreck.”

— Daniel Goleman

54. “1. Knowing one’s emotions. Self-awareness – recognizing a feeling as it happens – is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As.”

— Daniel Goleman

55. “Academic intelligence has little to do with emotional life. The brightest among us can founder on the shoals of unbridled passions and unruly impulses; people with high IQs can be stunningly poor pilots of their private lives.”

— Daniel Goleman

56. “Compassion begins with attention.”

— Daniel Goleman

57. “I don’t think focus is in itself ever a bad thing. But focus of the wrong kind, or managed poorly, can be.”

— Daniel Goleman

58. “Whenever you notice your mind wandering,” a fundamental instruction in meditation advises, “bring your mind back to its point of focus.” The operative phrase here is whenever you notice. As our mind drifts off, we almost never notice the moment it launches into some other orbit on its own.”

— Daniel Goleman

59. “Motivation aside, if people get better at these life skills, everyone benefits: The brain doesn’t distinguish between being a more empathic manager and a more empathic father.”

— Daniel Goleman

60. “Not that leaders need to be overly “nice”; the emotional art of leadership includes pressing the reality of work demands without unduly upsetting people.”

— Daniel Goleman

61. “The human brain is by no means fully formed at birth. It continues to shape itself through life, with the most intense growth occurring during childhood.”

— Daniel Goleman

62. “Emotionally Intelligent Parenting: How to Raise a Self-disciplined, Responsible, Socially Skilled Child. New.”

— Daniel Goleman

63. “Experience, particularly in childhood, sculpts the brain. The.”

— Daniel Goleman

64. “Visionary leaders help people to see how their work fits into the big picture, lending people a clear sense not just that what they do matters, but also why.”

— Daniel Goleman

65. “The inability to resist checking email or Facebook rather than focus on the person talking to us leads to what the sociologist Erving Goffman, a masterly observer of social interaction, called an “away,” a gesture that tells another person “I’m not interested” in what’s going on here and now.”

— Daniel Goleman

66. “Like secondhand smoke, the leakage of emotions can make a bystander an innocent casualty of someone else’s toxic state.”

— Daniel Goleman

67. “Green is a process, not a status. We need to think of ‘green’ as a verb, not an adjective.”

— Daniel Goleman

68. “Whoever has the mind to fight has broken his connection with the universe. If you try to dominate people you are already defeated. We study how to resolve conflict, not how to start it.”

— Daniel Goleman

69. “People who are optimistic see a failure as due to something that can be changed so that they can succeed next time around, while pessimists take the blame for the failure, ascribing it to some characteristic they are helpless to change.”

— Daniel Goleman

70. “Threats to our standing in the eyes of others are remarkably potent biologically, almost as powerful as those to our very survival.”

— Daniel Goleman

71. “A leader tuned out of his internal world will be rudderless; one blind to the world of others will be clueless; those indifferent to the larger systems within which they operate will be blindsided.”

— Daniel Goleman

72. “The other thing is that if you rely solely on medication to manage depression or anxiety, for example, you have done nothing to train the mind, so that when you come off the medication, you are just as vulnerable to a relapse as though you had never taken the medication.”

— Daniel Goleman

73. “The book is a dialogue between The Dalai Lama and a group of scientists about how we can better handle our destructive emotions and how to overcome them.”

— Daniel Goleman

74. “We’re being judged by a new yardstick: not just by how smart we are, or by our training and expertise, but also by how well we handle ourselves and each other.”

— Daniel Goleman

75. “There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse.”

— Daniel Goleman

76. “Doggedness depends on emotional traits – enthusiasm and persistence in the face of setbacks – above all else.”

— Daniel Goleman

77. “The antidote for mind wandering is meta-awareness, attention to attention itself, as in the ability to notice that you are not noticing what you should, and correcting your focus. Mindfulness makes this crucial attention muscle stronger.12.”

— Daniel Goleman

78. “Rapport demands joint attention – mutual focus. Our need to make an effort to have such human moments has never been greater, given the ocean of distractions we all navigate daily.”

— Daniel Goleman

79. “Fear, in evolution, has a special prominence: perhaps more than any other emotion it is crucial for survival.”

— Daniel Goleman

80. “Mindful meditation has been discovered to foster the ability to inhibit those very quick emotional impulses.”

— Daniel Goleman

81. “And that is the problem: academic intelligence offers virtually no preparation for the turmoil – or opportunity – life’s vicissitudes bring. Yet even though a high IQ is no guarantee of prosperity, prestige, or happiness in life, our schools and our culture fixate on academic abilities, ignoring emotional intelligence, a set of traits – some might call it character – that also matters immensely for our personal destiny.”

— Daniel Goleman

82. “Rumination can also make the depression stronger by creating conditions that are, well, more depressing.”

— Daniel Goleman

83. “Risk taking and the drive to pursue innovative ideas are the fuel that stokes the entrepreneurial spirit.”

— Daniel Goleman

84. “Stress makes people stupid.” On.”

— Daniel Goleman

85. “Women, on average, tend to be more aware of their emotions, show more empathy, and are more adept interpersonally. Men on the other hand, are more self-confident and optimistic, adapt more easily, and handle stress better.”

— Daniel Goleman

86. “The hippocampus is crucial in recognizing a face as that of your cousin. But it is the amygdala that adds you don’t really like her.”

— Daniel Goleman

87. “Daydreaming defeats practice; those of us who browse TV while working out will never reach the top ranks. Paying full attention seems to boost the mind’s processing speed, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or create neural networks for what we are practicing.”

— Daniel Goleman

88. “Western business people often don’t get the importance of establishing human relationships.”

— Daniel Goleman

89. “And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.”

— Daniel Goleman

90. “Our sense of well-being depends to some extent on others regarding us as a You; our yearning for connection is a primal human need, minimally for a cushion for survival. Today the neural echo of that need heightens our sensitivity to the difference between It and You – and makes us feel social rejection as deeply as physical pain.”

— Daniel Goleman

91. “Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel. HORACE WALPOLE.”

— Daniel Goleman

92. “Our passions, when well exercised, have wisdom; they guide our thinking, our values, our survival.”

— Daniel Goleman

93. “We need to re-create boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to the office, you need to create a virtual boundary that didn’t exist before.”

— Daniel Goleman

94. “The neocortex allows for the subtlety and complexity of emotional life, such as the ability to have feelings about our feelings.”

— Daniel Goleman

95. “If you do a practice and train your attention to hover in the present, then you will build the internal capacity to do that as needed – at will and voluntarily.”

— Daniel Goleman

96. “My hope was that organizations would start including this range of skills in their training programs – in other words, offer an adult education in social and emotional intelligence.”

— Daniel Goleman

97. “Smart phones and social media expand our universe. We can connect with others or collect information easier and faster than ever.”

— Daniel Goleman

98. “Emotional intelligence skills are synergistic with cognitive ones; top performers have both. The more complex the job, the more emotional intelligence matters – if only because a deficiency in these abilities can hinder the use of whatever technical expertise or intellect a person may have.”

— Daniel Goleman

99. “One of the leading theories of why electroconvulsive therapy is effective for most severe depressions is that it causes a loss of short-term memory – patients feel better because they can’t remember why they were sad.”

— Daniel Goleman

100. “The social brain is in its natural habitat when we’re talking with someone face-to-face in real time.”

— Daniel Goleman