Top 50 Peter Block Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “How do you change the world? One room at a time. Which room? The one you’re in.”

— Peter Block

2. “We must establish a personal connection with each other. Connection before content. Without relatedness, no work can occur.”

— Peter Block

3. “All we have to do to create the future is to change the nature of our conversations, to go from blame to ownership, and from bargaining to commitment, and from problem solving to possibility.”

— Peter Block

4. “Ones vision is not a road map but a compass.”

— Peter Block

5. “Why do anything unless it is going to be great?”

— Peter Block

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6. “The shift in the world begins with a shift in our thinking. Shifting our thinking does not change the world, but it creates a condition where the shift in the world becomes possible.”

— Peter Block

7. “The task of leadership is to be intentional about the way we group people and the questions that we engage them in.”

— Peter Block

8. “It is a misuse of our power to take responsibility for solving problems that belong to others.”

— Peter Block

9. “If there is no transformation inside of us, all the structural change in the world will have no impact on our institutions.”

— Peter Block

10. “We must act as if our institutions are ours to create, our learning is ours to define, our leadership we seek is ours to become.”

— Peter Block

11. “Relationship and connectedness are the pre-condition for change. Every meeting, every process, every training program has to get people connected first. Otherwise the content falls on deaf ears. So small groups are an essential building block to any future you want to create.”

— Peter Block

12. “Structure influences behavior. Design spaces that make you feel “you are welcome here and that you came to the right place.””

— Peter Block

13. “Every parent’s deepest wish is that their children are self sufficient, happy, and able to live a full life.”

— Peter Block

14. “To be committed means you are willing to make a promise with no exception of return.”

— Peter Block

15. “Transformation comes more from pursuing profound questions than seeking practical answers.”

— Peter Block

16. “Good questions work on us, we don’t work on them. They are not a project to be completed but a doorway opening onto greater depth of understanding, actions that will take us into being more fully alive.”

— Peter Block

17. “The essential challenge is to transform the isolation and self-interest within our communities into connectedness and caring for the whole.”

— Peter Block

18. “What worked yesterday is the gilded cage of tomorrow.”

— Peter Block

19. “As long as we wish for safety, we will have difficulty pursuing what matters.”

— Peter Block

20. “Advice is unfriendly to learning, especially when it is sought. Most of the time when people seek advice, they just want to be heard. Advice at best stops the conversation, definitely inhibits learning, and at worst claims dominance.”

— Peter Block

21. “The price of change is measured by our will and courage, our persistence, in the face of difficulty.”

— Peter Block

22. “If we believe something does not exist unless we measure it, then we put aside: love, feeling, intuition, art and philosophy.”

— Peter Block

23. “Change from the top down happens at the will and whim of those below.”

— Peter Block

24. “We are reluctant to let go of the belief that if I am to care for something I must control it.”

— Peter Block

25. “We change the world when we create the time and space for heartfelt, unique conversations that discuss values and affirm doubts, feelings, and intuition.”

— Peter Block

26. “We get the leaders we create.”

— Peter Block

27. “The world does not need a better definition of issues, or better planning or project management. It needs the issues and the plans to have more of an impact, which is the promise of engagement.”

— Peter Block

28. “We recognize the difference between being a citizen and being a consumer. The difference between subject and object. Citizens have the capacity to create for themselves whatever they require. Citizens have power, customers have needs.”

— Peter Block

29. “We have banished our artists to the fringe of society and tell them to eat cake. It is our artists who choose freedom over safety and use their talents to question and confront the culture.”

— Peter Block

30. “Questions draw us together. Answers push us apart.”

— Peter Block

31. “The goal is to balance a life that works with a life that counts.”

— Peter Block

32. “The key to creating or transforming community, then, is to see the power in the small but important elements of being with others. The shift we seek needs to be embodied in each invitation we make, each relationship we encounter, and each meeting we attend. For at the most operational and practical level, after all the thinking about policy, strategy, mission, and milestones, it gets down to this: How are we going to be when we gather together?”

— Peter Block

33. “If you need ownership and responsibility from core workers, patriarchy can’t get you there.”

— Peter Block

34. “How many times have we brought in an outsider to tell us what we already knew?”

— Peter Block

35. “Why follow the steps of another to find out where our dreams will lead us.”

— Peter Block

36. “Acting on what matters means that we will consistently find ourselves feeling like we are living on the margin of our institutions and our culture. This calls for some detachment from the mainstream.”

— Peter Block

37. “It is hard to learn when we think we know something.”

— Peter Block

38. “Anecdotes, personal stories, reminiscences, like biblical parables, are the medium through which faith is restored. Stories are a form of poetry, and give us a saving image to personally relate to.”

— Peter Block

39. “To live our lives fully, to work whole heartily, to refuse directly what we can’t swallow, to accepts the mystery in all matters of meaning- this is the ultimate adventure.”

— Peter Block

40. “If you believe that saying no will get you shot, well, what a fine way to go.”

— Peter Block

41. “The choice to worry about why we are doing something more than how we do something is risky business.”

— Peter Block

42. “Invitation is not only a step in bringing people together, it is also a fundamental way of being in a community. It manifests the willingness to live in a collaborative way. This means that a future can be created without having to force or sell it or barter for it. When we believe that barter or subtle coercion is necessary, we are operating out of a context of scarcity and self-interest, the core currencies of the economist.”

— Peter Block

43. “Understand that the task is to shift the demand for the right answer to the search for the right question.”

— Peter Block

44. “What makes community building so complex is that it occurs in an infinite number of small steps, sometimes in quiet moments that we notice out of the corner of our eye. It calls for us to treat as important many things that we thought we incidental. An afterthought becomes the point; a comment made in passing defines who we are more than all that came before. If the artist is one who captures the nuance of experience, then this is whom each of us must become.”

— Peter Block

45. “Learning and performance will become one and the same thing. Everything you say about learning will be about performance. People will get the point that learning is everything.”

— Peter Block

46. “The interest we have in problems is so intense that at some point we take our identity from those problems. Without them, it seems like we would not know who we are as a community. Many of the strongest advocates for change would lose their sense of identity if the change they desired ever occurred.”

— Peter Block

47. “We decide to move far enough to the edge of the culture to see it clearly. What is the norm and normal does not serve us well. Many of us have tried hard to live a “normal” life, and how is it going?”

— Peter Block

48. “Maybe the unvarnished meaning of growing up is the acceptance that living out our values, and also winning the approval of those who have power over us, is an unfulfillable longing.”

— Peter Block

49. “The things that matter to us are measured by depth. Would you assess your humanity by its pace? When I view myself as a time-sensitive product, valued for what I produce, then I have made depth, extended thought, and the inward journey marginal indulgences.”

— Peter Block

50. “Questions that are designed to change other people are the wrong questions. Wrong, not because they don’t matter or are based on ill intent, but because they reinforce the problem-solving model. They are questions that are the cause of the very thing we are trying to shift: the fragmented and retributive nature of our communities.”

— Peter Block