75 Quotes About Planning for Success

Reading Time: 5 Minutes

Do you have a written plan? If you don’t think planning is important, you may want to reconsider. We’ve put together 75 great inspirational quotes about the importance of planning.

  1. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
  2. “Good fortune is what happens when opportunity meets with planning.” ~ Thomas Edison
  3. “A plan is a list of actions arranged in whatever sequence is thought likely to achieve an objective.” ~ John Argenti
  4. “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” ~ Warren Buffett
  5. “If you don’t know where you are going, you’ll end up someplace else.” ~ Yogi Berra
  6. “Our goals can only be reached through a vehicle of a plan, in which we must fervently believe, and upon which we must vigorously act. There is no other route to success.” ~ Pablo Picasso
  7. “Always plan ahead. It wasn’t raining when Noah built the ark.” ~ Richard Cushing
  8. “It is not the strongest of the species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.” ~ Charles Darwin
  9. “The afternoon knows what the morning never suspected.” ~ Robert Frost
  10. “Never look back unless you are planning to go that way.” ~ Henry David Thoreau
  11. “There are some people who live in a dream world, and there are some who face reality; and then there are those who turn one into the other.” ~ Douglas H. Everett
  12. “Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.” ~ Peter Drucker
  13. “I don’t believe in failure. It’s not failure if you enjoyed the process.” ~ Oprah Winfrey
  14. “Chance favors the prepared mind.”~ Louis Pasteur
  15. “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.” ~ Peter F. Drucker
  16. “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood. Make big plans, aim high in hope and work.” ~ Daniel H. Burnham
  17. “Plan your work for today and every day, then work your plan.” ― Margaret Thatcher
  18. “No plan ever failed due to good planning.” ~ Jury Nel
  19. “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” ~ John F. Kennedy
  20. “It’s not the plan that’s important, it’s the planning.” ~ Dr. Gramme Edwards
  21. “Setting a goal is not the main thing. It is deciding how you will go about achieving it and staying with that plan.” ~ Tom Landry
  22. “Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
  23. “Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you ready or not, to put this plan into action.”~ Napoleon Hill
  24. “A man who does not plan long ahead will find trouble at his door.” ~ Confucius
  25. “I ain’t Martin Luther King. I don’t need a dream. I have a plan.” ~ Spike Lee
  26. “As for the future, your task is not to foresee it, but to enable it.” ~ Antoine de Saint Exupery
  27. “The man who is prepared has his battle half fought.” ~ Miguel De Cervantes
  28. “The more time you spend contemplating what you should have done…you lose valuable time planning what you can and will do.” ~ Lil Wayne
  29. “The backbone of success is hard work, determination, good planning, and perseverance.” ~ Mia Hamm
  30. “To accomplish great things, we must not only act but also dream. Not only plan but also believe.” ~ Anatole France
  31. “If Plan A doesn’t work, the alphabet has 25 more letters.” ~ Claire Cook
  32. “He, who every morning plans the transactions of the day, and follows that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through a labyrinth of the most busy life.” ~ Victor Hugo
  33. “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” ~ Benjamin Franklin
  34. “A good plan is like a road map: it shows the final destination and usually the best way to get there.” ~ H. Stanely Judd
  35. “It takes as much energy to wish as it does to plan.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
  36. “Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” ~ Alan Lakein
  37. “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do, and how to do it.” ~ Abraham Lincoln
  38. “The trouble with many plans is that they are based on the way things are now. To be successful, your personal plan must focus on what you want, not what you have. ~ Nido Qubein
  39. “It’s easy to come up with new ideas; the hard part is letting go of what worked for you two years ago, but will soon be out of date.” ~ Roger von Oech
  40. “A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.” ~ George S. Patton
  41. “Have a bias towards action – let’s see something happen now. You can break that big plan into small steps and take the first step right away.” ~ Indira Gandhi
  42. “Unless you have definite, precise, clearly set goals, you are not going to realize the maximum potential that lies within you.” ~ Zig Ziglar
  43. “Before anything else, preparation is the key to success.” ~ Alexander Graham Bell
  44. “If you are failing to plan, you are planning to fail.” ~ Tariq Siddique
  45. “I always say don’t make plans, make options.” ~ Jennifer Aniston
  46. “To achieve great things, two things are needed; a plan, and not quite enough time.” ~ Leonard Bernstein
  47. “Planning ahead is a measure of class. The rich and even the middle-class plan for generations, but the poor can plan ahead only a few weeks or days.” ~ Gloria Steinem
  48. “If you have accomplished all that you have planned for yourself, you have not planned enough.” ~ Edward Everett Hale
  49. “Planning is a process of choosing among those many options. If we do not choose to plan, then we choose to have others plan for us.” ~ Richard I. Winwood
  50. “Without goals, and plans to reach them, you are like a ship that has set sail with no destination.” ~ Fitzhugh Dodson
  51. “A plan relieves you of the torment of choice.” ~ Saul Bellow
  52. “Reduce your plan to writing. The moment you complete this, you will have definitely given concrete form to the intangible desire.” ~ Napoleon Hill
  53. “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.” ~ Gloria Steinem
  54. “Just because you made a good plan, doesn’t mean that’s what’s gonna happen.” ~ Taylor Swift
  55. “Good planning without good working is nothing.” ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
  56. “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near one.” ~ J.R.R. Tolkien
  57. “The majority of men meet with failure because of their lack of persistence in creating new plans to take the place of those which fail.” ~ Napoleon Hill
  58. “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” ~ Winston Churchill
  59. “The very least you can do in your life is to figure out what you hope for. And the most you can do is live inside that hope. Not admire it from a distance, but live right in it, under its roof.” ~ Shannon Alder
  60. “Plans are things that don’t change.” ~ Fujio Cho
  61. “The sooner you start planning your life, the sooner you will live the life you dream of.” ~ Hans Glint
  62. “Thinking well to be wise: planning well, wiser: doing well, wisest and best of all.” ~ Malcom Forbes
  63. “Speaking from my personal experiences, setting goals, along with a detailed action plan, has actually changed my life from one cast in frustration to one of purpose.” ~ Catherine Pulsifer
  64. “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.” ~ Confucius
  65. “Planning for success will make you even more creative.” ~ Danielle LaPorte
  66. “For tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.” ~ African Proverb
  67. “A plan that is not written, is just an idea.” ~ Dwain Siady
  68. “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.” ― Dwight D. Eisenhower
  69. “You can always amend a big plan, but you can never expand a little one. I don’t believe in little plans. I believe in plans big enough to meet a situation which we can’t possibly foresee now.” ~ Harry S. Truman
  70. “The reason that everybody likes planning is that nobody has to do anything.” ~ Jerry Brown
  71. “Plan for what is difficult while it is easy, do what is great while it is still small.” ~ Sun Tzu
  72. “Four steps to achievement: Plan purposely. Prepare prayerfully. Proceed positively. Pursue persistently.” ~ William A. Ward
  73. “There are dreamers and there are planners; the planners make their dreams come true.” ~ Edwin Louis Cole
  74. “The more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.” ~ Ronald Reagan
  75. “”When something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor.” ~ Elon Musk

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