40 Quotes On Preparation

In the journey of life, preparation often stands as the unseen foundation beneath success and achievement. Whether you're gearing up for a major career milestone, navigating personal growth, or fostering relationships, the art of preparation equips you to face challenges with resilience, wisdom, and confidence. As the old adage goes, "By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail." To inspire and motivate your path forward, we've curated a collection of the top 40 quotes on preparation. These insights from great thinkers and leaders across history will not only encourage you to prepare diligently but also to embrace the process as an integral aspect of achievement. Dive into these profound words and let them empower you to sculpt a future that you are ready to meet head-on.

1. “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” - Benjamin Franklin

2. “We should live our lives as though Christ was coming this afternoon.” - Jimmy Carter

3. “I will prepare and some day my chance will come.” - Abraham Lincoln

4. “Spectacular achievement is always preceded by unspectacular preparation.” - Robert Schuller

5. “Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.” - Thomas Huxley

6. “Opportunity is a haughty goddess who wastes no time with those who are unprepared. a” - George S. Clason

7. “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” - Abraham Lincoln

8. “Organize, don't agonize.” - Nancy Pelosi

9. “If your enemy is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is temperamental, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. If sovereign and subject are in accord, put division between them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected .” - Sun Tzu

10. “Why not seize the pleasure at once? -- How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation!” - Jane Austen

11. “But, if you've decided to go out on a limb and kill one, for goodness' sake, be prepared. We all read, with dismay, the sad story of a good woman wronged in south Mississippi who took that option and made a complete mess of the entire thing. See, first she shot him. Well, she saw right off the bat that that was a mistake because then she had this enormous dead body to deal with. He was every bit as much trouble to her dead as he ever had been alive, and was getting more so all the time. So then, she made another snap decision to cut him up in pieces and dispose of him a hunk at a time. More poor planning. First, she didn't have the proper carving utensils on hand and hacking him up proved to be just a major chore, plus it made just this colossal mess on her off-white shag living room carpet. It's getting to be like the Cat in the Hat now, only Thing Two ain't showing up to help with the clean-up. She finally gets him into portable-size portions, and wouldn't you know it? Cheap trash bags. Can anything else possible go wrong for this poor woman? So, the lesson here is obvious--for want of a small chain saw, a roll of Visqueen and some genuine Hefty bags, she is in Parchman Penitentiary today instead of New Orleans, where she'd planned to go with her new boyfriend. Preparation is everything.” - Jill Conner Browne

12. “All things are ready, if our mind be so.” - William Shakespeare

13. “hope for the best, prepare for the worst” - Chris Bradford

14. “Unfortunately, there seems to be far more opportunity out there than ability.... We should remember that good fortune often happens when opportunity meets with preparation.” - Thomas A. Edison

15. “He who is best prepared can best serve his moment of inspiration.” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge

16. “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” - Benjamin Franklin

17. “Champions do not become champions when they win the event, but in the hours, weeks, months and years they spend preparing for it. The victorious performance itself is merely the demonstration of their championship character.” - Alan Armstrong

18. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood's a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It's not for fighting.” - Frank Herbert

19. “We have to prepare for the worst, and the worst is war.” - Bernard Kouchner

20. “As far as the World Cup is concerned, it is a process. We don't want to jump to the 50th floor straight away. We must start on the ground floor.” - Sachin Tendulkar

21. “Another way to be prepared is to think negatively. Yes, I'm a great optimist. but, when trying to make a decision, I often think of the worst case scenario. I call it 'the eaten by wolves factor.' If I do something, what's the most terrible thing that could happen? Would I be eaten by wolves? One thing that makes it possible to be an optimist, is if you have a contingency plan for when all hell breaks loose. There are a lot of things I don't worry about, because I have a plan in place if they do.” - Randy Pausch

22. “If you believe you can accomplish everything by "cramming" at the eleventh hour, by all means, don't lift a finger now. But you may think twice about beginning to build your ark once it has already started raining” - Max Brooks

23. “It's best to have your tools with you. If you don't, you're apt to find something you didn't expect and get discouraged.” - Stephen King

24. “There is always a part of my mind that is preparing for the worst, and another part of my mind that believes if I prepare enough for it, the worst won’t happen.” - Kay Redfield Jamison

25. “If you had duct tape, you were prepared for anything.” - Annie Barrows

26. “This idea comes to you, you can see it, but to accomplish it you need what I call a "setup." For example, you may need a working shop or a working painting studio. You may beed a working music studio. Or a computer room where you can write something. It's crucial to have a setup, so that, at any given moment, when you get an idea, you have the place and the tools to make it happen. If you don't have a setup, there are many times when you get the inspiration, the idea, but you have no tools, no place to put it together. And the idea just sits there and festers. Overtime, it will go away. You didn't filfill it--and that's just a heartache.” - David Lynch

27. “Traveling can never be taken for granted, no matter how meticulous the preparations.” - Eugene Linden

28. “It is not very often that an opportunity comes knocking. But when it does, you better be bathed and dressed and ready to answer its call.” - Jyoti Arora

29. “It ought to be the business of every day to prepare for our final day (attributed to Matthew Henry)” - Francis Chan

30. “Always give your resume of good deeds when you run into someone that you wronged many years ago. They simply need to know today's version of you, before they judge you on yesterday's news.” - Shannon L. Alder

31. “Good luck is a residue of preparation.” - Jack Youngblood

32. “After 40 (old age for most of man's history), one should strive to be more or less packed and ready to go were the end call to come.” - Alain De Botton

33. “I believe luck is preparation meeting opportunity. If you hadn’t been prepared when the opportunity came along, you wouldn’t have been lucky.” - Oprah Winfrey

34. “Success comes from preparation.” - E'yen A. Gardner

35. “Our past is the forge upon which we are hardened and tempered, to prepare us for the present. We are like a fine blade that must be hammered into shape before it can be ready to make its finest cuts.” - Larry Atchley Jr.

36. “Only I have no luck any more. But who knows? Maybe today. Every day is a new day. It is better to be lucky. But I would rather be exact. Then when luck comes you are ready.” - Ernest Hemingway

37. “That's the one thing you can always depend on; as we're fighting one war, we're always preparing for the next one.” - Max Brooks

38. “When the noise is gone, and the air is still . . .prepare for survival.” - John-Talmage Mathis

39. “Preparation:allows you to prevent . . .the intensity of the ordeal.” - John-Talmage Mathis

40. “For most of her life she just expected things would work out, that people would be kind. Now she recognized her good fortune for what it was. She'd been lucky in so much, it had left her woefully unprepared for old age.” - Stewart O'Nan