Top 30 Priya Parker Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Crucible moments... are challenging moments in our lives that shape us in some deep way and shift our lens on the world. They are stories that define us in our own minds – and that, nevertheless, seldom come up in the ordinary course of conversation.”

— Priya Parker

2. “Ichi-go ichi-e. The master told me it roughly translates to “one meeting, one moment in your life that will never happen again.” She explained further: “We could meet again, but you have to praise this moment because in one year, we’ll have a new experience, and we will be different people and will be bringing new experiences with us, because we are also changed.”

— Priya Parker

3. “Take the reasons you think you are gathering – because it’s our departmental Monday-morning meeting; because it’s a family tradition to barbecue at the lake – and keep drilling below them. Ask why you’re doing it. Every time you get to another, deeper reason, ask why again. Keep asking why until you hit a belief or value.”

— Priya Parker

4. “We get lulled into the false belief that knowing the category of the gathering – the board meeting, workshop, birthday party, town hall – will be instructive to designing it. But we often choose the template – and the activities and structure that go along with it – before we’re clear on our purpose.”

— Priya Parker

5. “Reverse engineer an outcome: Think of what you want to be different because you gathered, and work backward from that outcome.”

— Priya Parker

6. “In a world of infinite choices, choosing one thing is the revolutionary act. Imposing that restriction is actually liberating.”

— Priya Parker

7. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” Before you gather, ask yourself: Why is this gathering different from all my other gatherings? Why is it different from other people’s gatherings of the same general type? What is this that other gatherings aren’t.”

— Priya Parker

8. “But exercising your authority once and early on in a gathering is as effective as exercising your body once and early on in your life. It isn’t enough just to set a purpose, direction, and ground rules. All these things require enforcement. And if you don’t enforce them, others will step in and enforce their own purposes, directions, and ground rules.”

— Priya Parker

9. “When we don’t examine the deeper assumptions behind why we gather, we end up skipping too quickly to replicating old, staid formats of gathering.”

— Priya Parker

10. “Your opening needs to be a kind of pleasant shock therapy. It should grab people. And in grabbing them, it should both awe the guests and honor them. It must plant in them the paradoxical feeling of being totally welcomed and deeply grateful to be there.”

— Priya Parker

11. “To get the group to be vulnerable, he said, we facilitators needed to share an even more personal story than we expected our clients to. We would set the depth of the group by whatever level we were willing to go to; however much we shared, they would share a little less. We had to become, in effect, participants.”

— Priya Parker

12. “It wasn’t always the big-tent groups, being everything to everyone, that most attracted people. It was often the groups that were narrower and more specific. “The more specific the Meetup, the more likelihood for success,” Scott Heiferman, its cofounder and CEO, told me.”

— Priya Parker

13. “Conversation Menu” that led the pairs through six “courses” of talk. Under the heading of “Starters” were questions like “How have your priorities changed over the years?” and “How have your background and experience limited or favoured you?” Under “Soups” was an invitation to ask, “Which parts of your life have been a waste of time?” Under “Fish”: “What have you rebelled against in the past and what are you rebelling against now?” Under “Salads”: “What are the limits of your compassion?”

— Priya Parker

14. “Gathering well isn’t a chill activity.”

— Priya Parker

15. “Barack Obama’s aunt once told him, ‘If everyone is family, no one is family.’ It is blood that makes a tribe, a border that makes a nation. The same is true of gatherings. So here is a corollary to his aunt’s saying: If everyone is invited, no one is invited – in the sense of being truly held by the group. By closing the door, you create the room.”

— Priya Parker

16. “Borrowing from my CAN group’s use of “crucible moments,” we asked the group to share a story, a moment, or an experience from their life that “changed the way you view the world.” Then we added the clincher: It had to be a story that no one else at the gathering knew.”

— Priya Parker

17. “People have to take chances in order to do something extraordinary.”

— Priya Parker

18. “So widespread is this desire not to impose that a growing number of people report not wanting any funeral at all when they die.”

— Priya Parker

19. “If guests often bring their stump rather than sprout speeches to events, if they often talk of their theories rather than their experiences, then organizers can succumb to their own kind of phoniness. They insist on keeping gatherings positive, especially when choosing themes. The meaningful gatherer doesn’t fear negativity, though, and in fact creates space for the dark and the dangerous.”

— Priya Parker

20. “It is, in the words of Alana Massey’s essay “Against Chill,” a “laid-back attitude, an absence of neurosis.” It “presides over the funeral of reasonable expectations.” It “takes and never gives.”

— Priya Parker

21. “You may well ask, Why does my gathering have to “take a stand”? It’s not the Battle of the Alamo. I have heard this question before. Virtually every time I push my clients to go deeper with their gathering’s purpose, there is a moment when they seem to wonder if I am preparing them for World War III. Yet forcing yourself to think about your gathering as stand-taking helps you get clear on its unique purpose.”

— Priya Parker

22. “Amy Cunningham, a funeral director in NY, ends a service, she purposefully tries to connect the grief of the family with that of mourners everywhere. She told me that she often ends her service by saying – ‘May the source of peace grant you peace and grant peace to all who morn’. She connects this individual suffering to the larger existence of suffering in the world. Thereby making it both smaller and bigger.”

— Priya Parker

23. “Because everything ends,” Chodo said. “There’s nothing that doesn’t end. On some level, what we do in our work is hold that truth. This is going to end, whether you like it or not.”

— Priya Parker

24. “In a group, if everybody thinks about the other person’s needs, everyone’s needs are actually fulfilled in the end. But if you only think about yourself, you are breaking that contract.” She.”

— Priya Parker

25. “She made those thank yous meaningful, honoring what was least, rather than most obvious about what most people did in the run-up to the event. And she massaged the Thank Yous into a lesson for the rest of us so that it didn’t feel like housekeeping.”

— Priya Parker

26. “We all wear masks, and that while masks have uses, taking them off can allow for deeper connection, shared growth, and more fruitful collaboration.”

— Priya Parker

27. “In 2010, what was then your standard-issue retirement community decided to try an experiment after a board member heard of a housing shortage at the nearby Cleveland Institute of Music. It invited 2 and eventually 5 music students from the school to live with its 120 elderly residents rent-free, in exchange for giving recitals and art-therapy courses and spending time with residents.”

— Priya Parker

28. “Chill” is a selfishness disguised as kindness.”

— Priya Parker

29. “When we gather, we often make the mistake of conflating category with purpose.”

— Priya Parker

30. “What is the purpose of the justice system we want to see? And what would a court look like if it were built according to that purpose?”

— Priya Parker

31. “But here is what the skilled gatherer must know: in trying not to offend, you fail to protect the gathering itself and the people in it.”

— Priya Parker

32. “Gatherings that are willing to be alienating – which is different from being alienating – have a better chance to dazzle.”

— Priya Parker

33. “Good controversy is much more likely to happen when it is invited in but carefully structured.”

— Priya Parker

34. “Too many of our gatherings don’t end. They simply stop.”

— Priya Parker