62 Inspiring Planning Quotes

In the fast-paced whirlwind of modern life, planning often stands as the beacon of clarity and direction. Whether charting a personal journey or strategizing for success in business, the art of planning can transform aspirations into achievable goals. With this in mind, we’ve gathered an exclusive selection of the top 62 inspiring planning quotes to invigorate your mind and sharpen your focus. These carefully chosen words of wisdom from thinkers, leaders, and visionaries serve as potent reminders of the power and potential of thoughtful preparation. As you delve into these quotes, let them ignite your enthusiasm and guide you toward crafting your own roadmap to success.

1. “Life is what happens to us while we are making other plans.” - Allen Saunders

2. “In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” - Dwight D. Eisenhower

3. “It does not do to leave a live dragon out of your calculations, if you live near him.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

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

5. “Failing to plan is planning to fail” - Alan Lakein

6. “Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.” - Gloria Steinem

7. “…everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don’t know the past, you can’t understand the present and plan properly for the future.” - Chaim Potok

8. “All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.” - Brian Tracy

9. “A clear vision, backed by definite plans, gives you a tremendous feeling of confidence and personal power.” - Brian Tracy

10. “If you don't know where you are going,you'll end up someplace else.” - Yogi Berra

11. “You can't plow a field simply by turning it over in your mind.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

12. “Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” - Warren Buffett

13. “Always, Always have a plan” - Rick Riordan

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

15. “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

16. “Fail to plan, plan to fail.” - Hillary Rodham Clinton

17. “All human plans [are] subject to ruthless revision by Nature, or Fate, or whatever one preferred to call the powers behind the Universe.” - Arthur C. Clarke

18. “You need to play to your strengths as a couple. Sharing is really awesome when you're messing around with Play-Doh in kindergarten. It's less awesome when you're adults and one of you is good at something and the other person sucks at it. So just let the more skilled person take the reins.” - Peter Scott

19. “A deliberate plan is not always necessary for the highest art; it emerges.” - Paul Johnson

20. “One [project of Teddy Cruz's] is titled Living Rooms at the Border. it takes a piece of land with an unused church zoned for three units and carefully arrays on it twelve affordable housing units, a community center (the converted church), offices for Casa in the church's attic, and a garden that can accommodate street markets and kiosks. 'In a place where current regulation allows only one use,' [Cruz} crows, ' we propose five different uses that support each other. This suggests a model of social sustainability for San Diego, one that conveys density not as bulk but as social choreography.' For both architect and patron, it's an exciting opportunity to prove that breaking the zoning codes can be for the best. Another one of Cruz's core beliefs is that if architects are going to achieve anything of social distinction, they will have to become developers' collaborators or developers themselves, rather than hirelings brought in after a project's parameters are laid out. ” - Rebecca Solnit

21. “If you don’t know exactly where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?” - Steve Maraboli

22. “When you establish a destination by defining what you want, then take physical action by making choices that move you towards that destination, the possibility for success is limitless and arrival at the destination is inevitable.” - Steve Maraboli

23. “The temptation was great to muster what force we could and put up a fight. It's the easiest way out, and the most satisfactory to self-respect--but, nearly invariably, the stupidest. ” - Isaac Asimov

24. “I'm never going to complain about receiving free early copies of books, because clearly there's nothing to complain about, but it does introduce a rogue element into one's otherwise carefully plotted reading schedule. ...Being a reader is sort of like being president, except reading involves fewer state dinners, usually. You have this agenda you want to get through, but you get distracted by life events, e.g., books arriving in the mail/World War III, and you are temporarly deflected from your chosen path. ” - Nick Hornby

25. “A city street equipped to handle strangers, and to make a safety asset, in itself, our of the presence of strangers, as the streets of successful city neighborhoods always do, must have three main qualities:First, there must be a clear demarcation between what is public space and what is private space. Public and private spaces cannot ooze into each other as they do typically in suburban settings or in projects.Second, there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.And third, the sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the number of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in buildings along the street to watch the sidewalks in sufficient numbers. Nobody enjoys sitting on a stoop or looking out a window at an empty street. Almost nobody does such a thing. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.” - Jane Jacobs

26. “Play on lively, diversified sidewalks differs from virtually all other daily incidental play offered American children today: It is play not conducted in a matriarchy.Most city architectural designers and planners are men. Curiously, they design and plan to exclude men as part of normal, daytime life wherever people live. In planning residential life, they aim at filling the presumed daily needs of impossibly vacuous housewives and preschool tots. They plan, in short, strictly for matriarchal societies.” - Jane Jacobs

27. “Neighborhood is a word that has come to sound like a Valentine. As a sentimental concept, 'neighborhood' is harmful to city planning. It leads to attempts at warping city life into imitations of town or suburban life. Sentimentality plays with sweet intentions in place of good sense.” - Jane Jacobs

28. “Is then no nook of English ground secureFrom rash assault?” - William Wordsworth

29. “I am a person who continually destroys the possibilities of a future because of the numbers of alternative viewpoints I can focus on the present.” - Doris Lessing

30. “You can neither lie to a neighbourhood park, nor reason with it. 'Artist's conceptions' and persuasive renderings can put pictures of life into proposed neighbourhood parks or park malls, and verbal rationalizations can conjure up users who ought to appreciate them, but in real life only diverse surroundings have the practical power of inducing a natural, continuing flow of life and use.” - Jane Jacobs

31. “To generate exuberant diversity in a city's streets and districts four conditions are indispensable:1. The district, and indeed as many of its internal parts as possible, must serve more than one primary function; preferably more than two...2. Most blocks must be short; that is, streets and opportunities to turn corners must be frequent.3. The district must mingle buildings that vary in age and condition, including a good proportion of old ones so that they vary in the economic yield they must produce. This mingling must be fairly close-grained.4. There must be a sufficiently dense concentration of people, for whatever purposes they may be there...” - Jane Jacobs

32. “I have been dwelling upon downtowns. This is not because mixtures of primary uses are unneeded elsewhere in cities. On the contrary they are needed, and the success of mixtures downtown (on in the most intensive portions of cities, whatever they are called) is related to the mixture possible in other part of cities.” - Jane Jacobs

33. “Since the Leeburg Pike [at Tyson's Corner] carries six to eight lanes of fast-moving traffic and the mall lacks an obvious pedestrian entrance, I decided to negotiate the street in my car rather than on foot. This is a problem planners call the 'drive to lunch syndrome,' typical of edge nodes where nothing is planned in advance and all the development takes place in isolated 'pods'.” - Dolores Hayden

34. “By the mid-1950s real estate promoters of the commercial strip were attaching it to the centerless residential suburb. Both strips and tracts expanded under the impact of federal subsidies to developers, but since these subsidies were indirect, it was hard for many citizens or local officials to know what was happening.” - Dolores Hayden

35. “In the wake of the tax bonanzas for new commercial projects, roadside strips boomed. Private developers responded to the lack of planned centers, public space, and public facilities in suburbs by building malls, office parks, and industrial parks as well as fast-food restaurants and motels.” - Dolores Hayden

36. “In the planning stage of a book, don't plan the ending. It has to be earned by all that will go before it.” - Rose Tremain

37. “Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.” - Peter F. Drucker

38. “Do not only think about it, but feel about it, also, before taking appropriate action.” - T.F. Hodge

39. “An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding.” - Roger Zelazny

40. “The majority of people don't want to plan. They want to be free of the responsibility of planning. What they ask for is merely some assurance that they will be decently provided for. The rest is a day-to-day enjoyment of life. That's the explanation for your Father Divines; people naturally flock to anyone they can trust for the necessities of life... They are the backbone of a community--solid, trust-worthy, essential.” - B.F. Skinner

41. “I need to stop getting into situations where all my options are potentially bad.” - Jack Campbell

42. “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.” - Winston Churchill

43. “Attacking a provincial lord in his manor house, surrounded by guards...Honestly, Kell, I'd nearly forgotten how foolhardy you can be."Foolhardy?" Kelsier asked with a laugh. "that wasn't foolhardy - that was just a small diversion. You should see some of the things I'm planning to do!Dockson stood for a moment then he laughed too. "By the Lord Ruler, it's good to have you back, kell! I'm afraid I've grown rather boring during the last few years""We'll fix that" Kelsier promised.” - Brandon Sanderson

44. “Don't die a pauper, don't die a commoner and a weakling.” - Jaachynma N.E. Agu

45. “It is impossible to foretell the future with any degree of accuracy, that it is impossible to rehearse life. A fault in the scenery, a face in the audience, an interruption of the audience on to the stage, and all our carefully planned gesture mean nothing, or mean too much.” - E.M. Forster

46. “It's a funny thing, how much time we spend planning our lives. We so convince ourselves of what we want to do, that sometimes we don't see what we're meant to do.” - Susan Gregg Gilmore

47. “Strategy is not really a solo sport – even if you’re the CEO.” - Max Mckeown

48. “The beginning [of a journey] is a terrible time to plan. It's the moment of greatest ignorance. In self-directed education, a lot of the value comes from exploiting opportunities that arise well out to sea, once I've seen some things and begun the learning process.” - James Marcus Bach

49. “She must protect herself. There would be no one to do it for her. A plan started to prick up its ears inside her, slowly, but getting stronger.” - Catherynne M. Valente

50. “That's like leaping off a precipice and trying to knit yourself a parachute on the way down.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

51. “What's the pleasure?' I asked.'Planning, I guess. I don't know. Doing stuff never feels as good as you hope it will feel.” - John Green

52. “The problem with being clever, Serene thought with a sigh, is that everyone assumes you're always planning something.” - Brandon Sanderson

53. “... the lofty mind of man can be imprisoned by the artifices of its own making.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

54. “Invest in the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life.” - Habeeb Akande

55. “Having a sense of purpose is having a sense of self. A course to plot is a destination to hope for.” - Bryant McGill

56. “Some take pains to be biblical, but many [Christian financial teachers, writers, investment counselors, and seminar leaders] simply parrot their secular colleagues. Other than beginning and ending with prayer, mentioning Christ, and sprinkling in some Bible verses, there's no fundamental difference. They reinforce people's materialist attitudes and lifestyles. They suggest a variety of profitable plans in which people can spend or stockpile the bulk of their resources. In short, to borrow a term from Jesus, some Christian financial experts are helping people to be the most successful 'rich fools' they can be.” - Randy Alcorn

57. “This is the best bad plan we have, sir.” - chris terrio

58. “The intelligent have plans; the wise have principles.” - Raheel Farooq

59. “To hear never-heard sounds, To see never-seen colors and shapes, To try to understand the imperceptible Power pervading the world; To fly and find pure ethereal substances That are not of matter But of that invisible soul pervading reality. To hear another soul and to whisper to another soul; To be a lantern in the darkness Or an umbrella in a stormy day; To feel much more than know. To be the eyes of an eagle, slope of a mountain; To be a wave understanding the influence of the moon; To be a tree and read the memory of the leaves; To be an insignificant pedestrian on the streets Of crazy cities watching, watching, and watching. To be a smile on the face of a woman And shine in her memory As a moment saved without planning.” - Dejan Stojanovic

60. “Your future is always more valuable than today, the sooner you realise that the better” - Steve Douglas

61. “Normally, when you challenge the conventional wisdom—that the current economic and political system is the only possible one—the first reaction you are likely to get is a demand for a detailed architectural blueprint of how an alternative system would work, down to the nature of its financial instruments, energy supplies, and policies of sewer maintenance. Next, you are likely to be asked for a detailed program of how this system will be brought into existence. Historically, this is ridiculous. When has social change ever happened according to someone’s blueprint? It’s not as if a small circle of visionaries in Renaissance Florence conceived of something they called “capitalism,” figured out the details of how the stock exchange and factories would someday work, and then put in place a program to bring their visions into reality. In fact, the idea is so absurd we might well ask ourselves how it ever occurred to us to imagine this is how change happens to begin.” - David Graeber

62. “She had reason to doubt him; he was real good at planning but real bad at doing.” - Junot Diaz