Top 180 Daniel Goleman Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “But once you are in that field, emotional intelligence emerges as a much stronger predictor of who will be most successful, because it is how we handle ourselves in our relationships that determines how well we do once we are in a given job.”

— Daniel Goleman

102. “People’s beliefs about their abilities have a profound effect on those abilities. Ability is not a fixed property; there is a huge variability in how you perform. People who have a sense of self-efficacy bounce back from failures; they approach things in terms of how to handle them rather than worrying about what can go wrong.”

— Daniel Goleman

103. “When it comes to exploring the mind in the framework of cognitive neuroscience, the maximal yield of data comes from integrating what a person experiences – the first person – with what the measurements show – the third person.”

— Daniel Goleman

104. “A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that.”

— Daniel Goleman

105. “When I went on to write my next book, Working With Emotional Intelligence, I wanted to make a business case that the best performers were those people strong in these skills.”

— Daniel Goleman

106. “I would say that IQ is the strongest predictor of which field you can get into and hold a job in, whether you can be an accountant, lawyer or nurse, for example.”

— Daniel Goleman

107. “Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.”

— Daniel Goleman

108. “Want a happier, more content life? I highly recommend the down-to-earth methods you’ll find in ‘Mindfulness.’ Professor Mark Williams and Dr Danny Penman have teamed up to give us scientifically grounded techniques we can apply in the midst of our everyday challenges and catastrophes.”

— Daniel Goleman

109. “For leaders to get results they need all three kinds of focus. Inner focus attunes us to our intuitions, guiding values, and better decisions. Other focus smooths our connections to the people in our lives. And outer focus lets us navigate in the larger world. 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

110. “The people we get along with, trust, feel simpatico with, are the strongest links in our networks.”

— Daniel Goleman

111. “Brain studies of mental workouts in which you sustain a single, chosen focus show that the more you detach from what’s distracting you and refocus on what you should be paying attention to, the stronger this brain circuitry becomes.”

— Daniel Goleman

112. “Feelings are self-justifying, with a set of perceptions and “proofs” all their own.”

— Daniel Goleman

113. “Self-absorption in all its forms kills empathy, let alone compassion. When we focus on ourselves, our world contracts as our problems and preoccupations loom large. But when we focus on others, our world expands. Our own problems drift to the periphery of the mind and so seem smaller, and we increase our capacity for connection – or compassionate action.”

— Daniel Goleman

114. “Just seeing someone express an emotion can evoke that mood, whether you realize you mimic the facial expression or not. This happens to us all the time – there’s a dance, a synchrony, a transmission of emotions. This mood synchrony determines whether you feel an interaction went well or not.” The.”

— Daniel Goleman

115. “The goal of attunement is not simply continual meshing, with an utter entrainment of every thought and feeling; it also includes giving each other space to be alone as needed. This cycle of connectedness strikes a balance between the individual’s needs and the couple’s. As one family therapist put it, “The more a couple can be apart, the more they can be together.”

— Daniel Goleman

116. “In the new workplace, with its emphasis on flexibility, teams and a strong customer orientation, this crucial set of emotional competencies is becoming increasingly essential for excellence in every job in every part of the world.”

— Daniel Goleman

117. “Empathetic people are superb at recognizing and meeting the needs of clients, customers, or subordinates. They seem approachable, wanting to hear what people have to say. They listen carefully, picking up on what people are truly concerned about, and respond on the mark.”

— Daniel Goleman

118. “But there is virtually no relationship between being an expert and being seen as someone people can trust with their secrets, doubts, and vulnerabilities. A petty office tyrant or micromanager may be high on expertise, but will be so low on trust that it will undermine their ability to manage, and effectively exclude them from informal networks.”

— Daniel Goleman

119. “In short, out-of-control emotions can make smart people stupid.”

— Daniel Goleman

120. “When the darkness is seen as a necessary prelude to the creative light, one is less likely to ascribe frustration to personal inadequacy or label it as bad.”

— Daniel Goleman

121. “The emotional brain is highly attuned to symbolic meanings and to the mode Freud called the ‘primary process’ – the messages of metaphor, story, myth, the arts.”

— Daniel Goleman

122. “Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.”

— Daniel Goleman

123. “People tend to become more emotionally intelligent as they age and mature.”

— Daniel Goleman

124. “Buying phosphate-free soap allows you to say, ‘My detergent doesn’t have the harsh chemicals others do.’ The question is, how are you washing with it? The very worst thing for the Earth about detergent is that we heat water to use it.”

— Daniel Goleman

125. “It’s not the chatter of people around us that is the most powerful distractor, but rather the chatter of our own minds. Utter concentration demands these inner voices be stilled. Start to subtract sevens successively from 100 and, if you keep your focus on the task, your chatter zone goes quiet.”

— Daniel Goleman

126. “We transmit and catch moods from each other in what amounts to a subterranean economy of the psyche in which some encounters are toxic, some nourishing.”

— Daniel Goleman

127. “Our genetic heritage endows each of us with a series of emotional set-points that determines our temperament. But the brain circuitry involved is extraordinarily malleable; temperament is not destiny.”

— Daniel Goleman

128. “At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift-a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.”

— Daniel Goleman

129. “Some children naturally have more cognitive control than others, and in all kids this essential skill is being compromised by the usual suspects: smartphones, TV, etc. But there are many ways that adults can help kids learn better cognitive control.”

— Daniel Goleman

130. “In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.”

— Daniel Goleman

131. “If you are doing mindfulness meditation, you are doing it with your ability to attend to the moment.”

— Daniel Goleman

132. “Martin Luther King Jr. observed that those who failed to offer their aid asked themselves the question: “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” But the Good Samaritan reversed the question: “If I do not stop to help this man what will happen to him?”

— Daniel Goleman

133. “The new measure takes for granted having enough intellectual ability and technical know-how to do our jobs; it focuses instead on personal qualities, such as initiative and empathy, adaptability and persuasiveness.”

— Daniel Goleman

134. “While there I began to study the Asian religions as theories of mind.”

— Daniel Goleman

135. “The sweet spot for smart decisions, then, comes not just from being a domain expert, but also from having high self-awareness.”

— Daniel Goleman

136. “We should spend less time ranking children and more time helping them to identify their natural competencies and gifts, and cultivate those.”

— Daniel Goleman

137. “Emotional intelligence does not mean merely “being nice”. At strategic moment it may demand not “being nice”, but rather, for example, bluntly confronting someone with an uncomfortable but consequential truth they’ve been avoiding.”

— Daniel Goleman

138. “It is difficult to spread the contagion of excitement without having a sense of purpose and direction.”

— Daniel Goleman

139. “Though they are quick to put others down, unhealthy narcissists view themselves in absolutely positive terms. They.”

— Daniel Goleman

140. “An artful critique focuses on what a person has done and can do rather than reading a mark of character into a job poorly done. As Larson observes, “A character attack – calling someone stupid or incompetent – misses the point. You immediately put him on the defensive, so that he’s no longer receptive to what you have to tell him about how to do things better.”

— Daniel Goleman

141. “Add the sounds of silence to the list of emotional risks to health – and close emotional ties to the list of protective factors. Studies done over two decades involving more than thirty-seven thousand people show that social isolation – the sense that you have nobody with whom you can share your private feelings or have close contact – doubles the chances of sickness or death.37.”

— Daniel Goleman

142. “Making choices that improve things for all of us on the planet is an act of compassion, a simple act we can do any time we go shopping.”

— Daniel Goleman

143. “Tightly focused attention gets fatigued – much like an overworked muscle – when we push to the point of cognitive exhaustion. The signs of mental fatigue, such as a drop in effectiveness and a rise in distractedness and irritability, signify that the mental effort needed to sustain focus has depleted the glucose that feeds neural energy.”

— Daniel Goleman

144. “In the calculus of the heart it is the ratio of positive to negative emotions that determines the sense of well- being.”

— Daniel Goleman

145. “A series of studies by Marian Radke-Yarrow and Carolyn Zahn-Waxler at the National Institute of Mental Health showed that a large part of this difference in empathic concern had to do with how parents disciplined their children. Children, they found, were more empathic when the discipline included calling strong attention to the distress their misbehavior caused someone else: “Look how sad you’ve made her feel” instead of “That was naughty.”

— Daniel Goleman

146. “Benjamin Franklin put it well: “Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one.”

— Daniel Goleman

147. “When girls play together, they do so in small, intimate groups, with an emphasis on minimizing hostility and maximizing cooperation, while boys’ games are in larger groups, with an emphasis on competition. One key difference can be seen in what happens when games boys or girls are playing get disrupted by someone getting hurt. If a boy who has gotten hurt gets upset, he is expected to get out of the way and stop crying so the game can go on.”

— Daniel Goleman

148. “Every morning, I go off to a small studio behind my house to write. I try to ignore all email and phone calls until lunchtime. Then I launch into the sometimes frantic busy-ness of a tightly scheduled day.”

— Daniel Goleman

149. “The industrial processes in use today were developed at a time when no one had to consider what the environmental impact was. Who cared? But making ecological concerns matter to a company’s bottom line will help it do the research and development that will reinvent everything we buy.”

— Daniel Goleman

150. “Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.”

— Daniel Goleman