Quotes from Daniel Goleman

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.

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.

Emotional 'literacy' implies an expanded responsibility for schools in helping to socialize children. This daunting task requires two major changes: that teachers go beyond their traditional mission and that people in the community become more involved with schools as both active participants in children's learning and as individual mentors.

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.

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.

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.

As a freshman in college, I was having a lot of trouble adjusting. I took a meditation class to handle anxiety. It really helped. Then as a grad student at Harvard, I was awarded a pre-doctoral traveling fellowship to India, where my focus was on the ancient systems of psychology and meditation practices of Asia.

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.

True compassion means not only feeling another's pain but also being moved to help relieve it.

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

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

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

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

In politics, readily dismissing inconvenient people can easily extend to dismissing inconvenient truths about them.

Societies can be sunk by the weight of buried ugliness.

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

Social distance makes it all the easier to focus on small differences between groups and to put a negative spin on the ways of others and a positive spin on our own.

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

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

Daydreaming incubates creative discovery.

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

Life is a comedy for those who think and a tragedy for those who feel.

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.

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