Top 180 Daniel Goleman Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

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

— Daniel Goleman

106. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

108. “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

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

113. “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

114. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

116. “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

117. “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

118. “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

119. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

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

— Daniel Goleman

122. “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

123. “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

124. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

126. “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

127. “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

128. “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

129. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

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

— Daniel Goleman

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

— Daniel Goleman

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

— Daniel Goleman

134. “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

135. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

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

— Daniel Goleman

138. “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

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

142. “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

143. “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

144. “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

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

— Daniel Goleman

146. “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

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Companies in the East put a lot more emphasis on human relationships, while those from the West focus on the product, the bottom line. Westerners appear to have more of a need for achievement, while in the East there’s more need for affiliation.”

— Daniel Goleman

150. “Evolutionary theory holds that our ability to sense when we should be suspicious has been every bit as essential for human survival as our capacity for trust and cooperation.”

— Daniel Goleman