Top 180 Daniel Goleman Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “Once shoppers become empowered, we will facilitate industries thinking in completely new terms; for example, making products that are totally biodegradable.”

— Daniel Goleman

154. “It demoralizes people just to hear that they are doing “something” wrong without knowing what the specifics are so they can change.”

— Daniel Goleman

155. “I think the smartest thing for people to do to manage very distressing emotions is to take a medication if it helps, but don’t do only that. You also need to train your mind.”

— Daniel Goleman

156. “Steve Jobs gave a heartfelt talk to a graduating class at Stanford University. His advice: “Don’t let the voice of others’ opinions drown out your inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”3.”

— Daniel Goleman

157. “We typically avoid situations or fields in which we fear we might fail; even if we actually have the abilities it takes to succeed at a job, if we lack the belief that we can handle its challenges, we can start to act in ways that doom us. The thought “I can’t do this” is crippling.”

— Daniel Goleman

158. “What seems to set apart those at the very top of competitive pursuits from others of roughly equal ability is the degree to which, beginning early in life, they can pursue an arduous practice routine for years and years.”

— Daniel Goleman

159. “People with well-developed emotional skills are also more likely to be content and effective in their lives, mastering the habits of mind that foster their own productivity; people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.”

— Daniel Goleman

160. “But amid the din and distraction of work life, poor listening has become epidemic.”

— Daniel Goleman

161. “But there has also been a notable increase in recent years of these applications by a much wider slice of psychotherapists – far greater interest than ever before.”

— Daniel Goleman

162. “You see it in jazz musicians, who never rehearse exactly what they do, but just seem to know when to take center stage, when to fade into the background. When jazz artists were compared with classical musicians in brain function, they showed more neural indicators of self-awareness.15 As one jazz artist put it, “In jazz you have to tune in to how your body is feeling so you know when to riff.”

— Daniel Goleman

163. “Teachers need to be comfortable talking about feelings.”

— Daniel Goleman

164. “However, I began meditating at about that time and have continued on and off over the years.”

— Daniel Goleman

165. “We’re exposed and carry in our bodies multiple chemicals, and we have to understand how they interact. Both how they individually interact and the thousands of effects they can produce when they interact with the receptors that run our bodies.”

— Daniel Goleman

166. “Our journey begins in Part One with new discoveries about the brain’s emotional architecture that offer an explanation of those most baffling moments in our lives when feeling overwhelms all rationality. Understanding the interplay of brain structures that rule our moments of rage and fear – or passion and joy – reveals.”

— Daniel Goleman

167. “This harkens back to Freud’s famous question, “What does woman want?” As Epstein answers, “She wants a partner who cares what she wants.”

— Daniel Goleman

168. “Helping people better manage their upsetting feelings – anger, anxiety, depression, pessimism, and loneliness – is a form of disease prevention. Since the data show that the toxicity of these emotions, when chronic, is on a par with smoking cigarettes, helping people handle them better could potentially have a medical payoff as great as getting heavy smokers to quit.”

— Daniel Goleman

169. “Great spiritual teachers, like Buddha and Jesus, have touched their disciples’ hearts by speaking in the language of emotion, teaching in parables, fables, and stories. Indeed, religious symbol and ritual makes little sense from the rational point of view; it is couched in the vernacular of the heart.”

— Daniel Goleman

170. “But the rational mind usually doesn’t decide what emotions we “should” have !”

— Daniel Goleman

171. “Others point to data showing that even as toddlers, 40 percent of American two-year-olds watch TV for at least three hours a day – hours they are not interacting with people who can help them learn to get along better. The more TV they watch, the more unruly they are by school age.”

— Daniel Goleman

172. “Who does not recall school at least in part as endless dreary hours of boredom punctuated by moments of high anxiety?”

— Daniel Goleman

173. “If there is a remedy, I feel it must lie in how we prepare our young for life.”

— Daniel Goleman

174. “Forthrightness is the brain’s default response: our neural wiring transmits our every minor mood onto the muscles of our face, making our feelings instantly visible. The display of emotion is automatic and unconscious, and so its suppression demands conscious effort. Being devious about what we feel – trying to hide our fear or anger – demands active effort and rarely succeeds perfectly.22.”

— Daniel Goleman

175. “In Japan, I learned the hard way that the moment of exchanging business cards signals an important ritual. We Americans are prone to casually pocketing the card without looking, which there indicates disrespect. I was told you should take the card carefully, hold it in both hands, and study it for a while before putting it away in a special case.”

— Daniel Goleman

176. “Decades before we began to drown in a sea of distractions, cognitive scientist Herbert Simon made this prescient observation: “What information consumes is attention. A wealth of information means a poverty of attention.”

— Daniel Goleman

177. “The creative mind is, by its very nature, a bit unruly. There is a natural tension between orderly self-control and the innovative urge. It’s not that people who are creative are out-of-control emotionally; rather, they are willing to entertain a wider range of impulse and action than do less adventurous spirits. That is, after all, what creates new possibilities.”

— Daniel Goleman

178. “It’s the most important relationships in your life, the people you see day in and day out, that seem to be crucial for your health. And the more significant the relationship is in your life, the more it matters for your health.”43.”

— Daniel Goleman

179. “Other research has shown that in the first few milliseconds of our perceiving something we not only unconsciously comprehend what it is, but decide whether we like it or not; the “cognitive unconscious” presents our awareness with not just the identity of what we see, but an opinion about it.7 Our emotions have a mind of their own, one which can hold views quite independently of our rational mind.”

— Daniel Goleman

180. “In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory – like solving complex math problems – can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5.”

— Daniel Goleman

181. “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”12.”

— Daniel Goleman

182. “We do not compete in our careers with people who lack the requisite intelligence to enter and stay in our field – but rather against the much smaller group of those who have managed to jump the hurdles of schooling, entry exams, and other cognitive challenges to get into the field in the first place.”

— Daniel Goleman

183. “Ordinarily, small children learn much about emotions by looking at the other person’s eyes, while those with autism avoid the eyes and so fail to get those lessons.”

— Daniel Goleman

184. “In any interaction the more high-power person tends to focus his or her gaze on the other person less than others, and is more likely to interrupt and to monopolize the conversation – all signifying a lack of attention.”

— Daniel Goleman

185. “Mindfulness helps especially for those of us for whom every setback, hurt or dissapointment creates endless cascades of rumination.”

— Daniel Goleman

186. “As Marcus Aurelius said millennia ago, pain “is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it, and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.”

— Daniel Goleman

187. “In many or most moments these minds are exquisitely coordinated; feelings are essential to thought, thought to feeling. But when passions surge the balance tips: it is the emotional mind that captures the upper hand, swamping the rational mind.”

— Daniel Goleman

188. “It’s not the highs along the way that matter. It’s who you become.”

— Daniel Goleman

189. “I had conjectured that today’s children are unintended victims of economic and technological progress, deskilled in EI because their parents spend more time at work than in previous generations, because increased mobility has cut ties to extended family, and because “free” time has become so structured and overorganized.”

— Daniel Goleman

190. “Empathy builds on self-awareness; the more open we are to our own emotions, the more skilled we will be in reading feelings.”

— Daniel Goleman

191. “Hope, in a technical sense, is more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right. Snyder defines it with more specificity as “believing you have both the will and the way to accomplish your goals, whatever they may be.” People.”

— Daniel Goleman

192. “The ability to control impulse is the base of will and character. By the same token, the root of altruism lies in empathy, the ability to read emotions in others; lacking a sense of another’s need or despair, there is no caring. And if there are any two moral stances that our times call for, they are precisely these, self-restraint and compassion.”

— Daniel Goleman

193. “We live in a world our minds build rather than actually perceiving the endless details of what is happening.”

— Daniel Goleman

194. “Reducing the economic gap may be impossible without also addressing the gap in empathy.”

— Daniel Goleman