78 Planning Quotes For Success

Planning is the cornerstone of success. It sets the foundation for turning visions into reality, giving direction to our aspirations and structure to our efforts. Whether it's charting a course for personal growth, mapping out business strategies, or setting life goals, the power of a well-thought-out plan cannot be overstated. To inspire and guide you on your journey, we've curated a selection of the top 78 planning quotes. These insights from thought leaders, visionaries, and successful figures across various fields offer valuable lessons and motivation to help you achieve your dreams. Dive in and let these words of wisdom energize your planning process and propel you towards success.

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

2. “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.The Economist, December 4, 2003” - William Gibson

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

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

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

6. “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

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

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

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

10. “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley.” - Robert Burns

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

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

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

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

15. “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

16. “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

17. “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.[State of the Union Address January 11 1962]” - John F. Kennedy

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

19. “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

20. “If you don't have a well-thought out dream, you can start by figuring out where you want to go. If you cannot see yourself fairly or accurately represented in the community you live (from restaurants to department stores to clothing choices to conversations at the dinner table) and nothing there makes you feel awake or alive, I suggest you start doing some research on some other communities.” - Kelly Cutrone

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. “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

24. “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

25. “[Public housing projects] are not lacking in natural leaders,' [Ellen Lurie, a social worker in East Harlem] says. 'They contain people with real ability, wonderful people many of them, but the typical sequence is that in the course of organization leaders have found each other, gotten all involved in each others' social lives, and have ended up talking to nobody but each other. They have not found their followers. Everything tends to degenerate into ineffective cliques, as a natural course. There is no normal public life. Just the mechanics of people learning what s going on is so difficult. It all makes the simplest social gain extra hard for these people.” - 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. “As children get older, this incidental outdoor activity--say, while waiting to be called to eat--becomes less bumptious, physically and entails more loitering with others, sizing people up, flirting, talking, pushing, shoving and horseplay. Adolescents are always being criticized for this kind of loitering, but they can hardly grow up without it. The trouble comes when it is done not within society, but as a form of outlaw life.The requisite for any of these varieties of incidental play is not pretentious equipment of any sort, but rather space at an immediately convenient and interesting place. The play gets crowded out if sidewalks are too narrow relative to the total demands put on them. It is especially crowded out if the sidewalks also lack minor irregularities in building line. An immense amount of both loitering and play goes on in shallow sidewalk niches out of the line of moving pedestrian feet.” - Jane Jacobs

28. “The more successfully a city mingles everyday diversity of uses and users in its everyday streets, the more successfully, casually (and economically) its people thereby enliven and support well-located parks that can thus give back grace and delight to their neighborhoods instead of vacuity. ” - Jane Jacobs

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

30. “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

31. “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

32. “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

33. “No neighbourhood or district, no matter how well established, prestigious or well heeled and no matter how intensely populated for one purpose, can flout the necessity for spreading people through time of day without frustrating its potential for generating diversity.” - Jane Jacobs

34. “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

35. “(The psuedoscience of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success.)” - Jane Jacobs

36. “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

37. “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

38. “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

39. “Poor planning on your part does not necessitate an emergency on mine.” - Bob Carter

40. “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

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

42. “If you fail to plan, you are planning to fail!” - Benjamin Franklin

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

44. “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

45. “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

46. “Two types of choices seem to me to have been crucial in tipping the outcomes [of the various societies' histories] towards success or failure: long-term planning and willingness to reconsider core values. On reflection we can also recognize the crucial role of these same two choices for the outcomes of our individual lives.” - Jared Diamond

47. “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

48. “You can't go around making plans that have you getting killed as a by-product. Eventually one of them is going to work.” - Holly Black

49. “Human beings, like plans, prove fallible in the presence of those ingredients that are missing in maneuvers - danger, death, and live ammunition.” - Barbara W. Tuchman

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

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

52. “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

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

54. “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

55. “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

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

57. “You can't plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.” - Jim Butcher

58. “We're endangered by our own success.” - Vernor Vinge

59. “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

60. “He was not used to being at a loss. Usually, he was the gentleman with the plan. Every little detail cataloged and put in its place. But now he had no place, and the details were everywhere.” - Lish McBride

61. “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

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

63. “When did having a life become an event you had to schedule?” - Karen Marie Moning

64. “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

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

66. “They will smile, as they always do when they plan a major attack late in the night.” - Dejan Stojanovic

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

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

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

70. “Businesses, like babies and books, need nurturing, time, energy, love, planning and, yes, money to develop, grow and prosper.” - Rachael Bermingham

71. “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

72. “A man may plant a tree for a number of reasons. Perhaps he likes trees. Perhaps he wants shelter. Or perhaps he knows that someday he may need the firewood.” - Joanne Harris

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

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

75. “La planificación a largo plazo en un negocio es una fantasía, a no ser que tú seas una pitonisa” - Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

76. “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

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

78. “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