The 62 Most Inspiring Project Management Quotes

Without further ado, here are 62 project management quotes to inspire and motivate you:

• "Let our advance worrying become advance thinking and planning." ~ Winston Churchill 
• "It's a bad plan that admits of no modification." ~ Publilius Syrus 
• "Plans are worthless. Planning is essential." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower 
• "Expect the best, plan for the worst, and prepare to be surprised." ~ Denis Waitley 
• "Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work." ~ Peter Drucker 
• "A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow." ~ Proverb 
• "First, have a definite, clear practical ideal; a goal, an objective. Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends; wisdom, money, materials, and methods. Third, adjust all your means to that end." ~ Aristotle 
• "Those who plan do better than those who do not plan even though they rarely stick to their plan."  ~ Winston Churchill 
• "If you don't know where you are going. How can you expect to get there?" ~ Basil S. Walsh 
• "A good plan can help with risk analyses but it will never guarantee the smooth running of the project." ~ Bentley and Borman

• "Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things." ~ Peter F. Drucker
• "One of the true tests of leadership is the ability to recognize a problem before it becomes an emergency." ~ Arnold Glasow 
• "The only real training for leadership is leadership." ~ Antony Jay 
• "The key to successful leadership today is influence not authority." ~ Kenneth Blanchard 
• "If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader." ~ John Quincy Adams 
• "Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it." ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower 
• "Inventories can be managed but people must be lead." ~ Ross Perot 
• "Effective leaders help others to understand the necessity of change and to accept a common vision of the desired outcome." ~ John Kotter
• "People buy into the leader before they buy into the vision." ~ John C. Maxwell

• "Get the right people. Then no matter what all else you might do wrong after that, the people will save you. That’s what management is all about." ~ Tom DeMarco
• "Management must manage!" ~ Harold Geneen 
• "Management is, above all, a practice where art, science, and craft meet." ~ Henry Mintzberg

• "It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be." ~ Isaac Asimov 
• "Change is not made without inconvenience, even from worse to better." ~ Samuel Johnson
• "It is always easier to talk about change than to make it." ~ Alvin Toffler
• "It must be considered that there is nothing more difficult to carry out nor more doubtful of success nor more dangerous to handle than to initiate a new order of things." ~ Machiavelli
• "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man." ~ George Bernard Shaw
• "There is nothing permanent except change." ~ Heraclitus

• "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." ~ George Bernard Shaw
• "The most important thing in communication is hearing what isn't said." ~ Peter Drucker
• "Brevity is the soul of wit." ~ William Shakespeare
• "Communication is a skill that you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life." ~ Brian Tracy
• "To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others." ~ Tony Robbins
• "My belief is that communication is the best way to create strong relationships." ~ Jada Pinkett Smith

• "The major reason for setting a goal is for what it makes of you to accomplish it. What it makes of you will always be the far greater value than what you get." ~ Jim Rohn 
• "Goals are dreams with deadlines." ~ Diana Scharf 
• "Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with Vision is making a positive difference." ~ Joel Barker
• "He who has a ‘why’ to live for can bear with almost any ‘how’." ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

• "I feel that the most important requirement in success is learning to overcome failure. You must learn to tolerate it, but never accept it." ~ Reggie Jackson 
• "Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently." ~ Henry Ford 
• "Remember the two benefits of failure. First, if you do fail, you learn what doesn't work; and second, the failure gives you the opportunity to try a new approach." ~ Roger Von Oech 
• "The greatest barrier to success is the fear of failure." ~ Sven Goran Eriksson 
• "There are no failures - just experiences and your reactions to them." ~ Tom Krause 
• "Just because something doesn't do what you planned it to do doesn't mean it's useless." ~ Thomas Edison 
• "It's fine to celebrate success but it is more important to heed the lessons of failure." ~ Bill Gates
• "Far better is it to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure... than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much, because they live in a gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat." ~ Theodore Roosevelt
• "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work." ~ Thomas A. Edison
• "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default." ~ J. K. Rowling
• "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better." ~ Samuel Beckett
• "Perseverance is failing 19 times and succeeding the 20th." ~ Julie Andrews

• "Better three hours too soon than a minute too late." ~  William Shakespeare
• "Lost time is never found again." ~ Benjamin Franklin
• "Time is the most valuable thing a man can spend." ~ Theophrastus
• "Time is what we want most, but what we use worst." ~ William Penn
• "You may delay, but time will not." ~ Benjamin Franklin
• "Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them." ~ Henry Ford
• "Much may be done in those little shreds and patches of time which every day produces, and which most men throw away." ~ Charles Caleb Colton

• "Unity is strength... when there is teamwork and collaboration, wonderful things can be achieved." ~ Mattie Stepanek
• "Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships." ~ Michael Jordan
• "As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people's ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life." ~ Amy Poehler
• "Collaboration is important not just because it's a better way to learn. The spirit of collaboration is penetrating every institution and all of our lives. So learning to collaborate is part of equipping yourself for effectiveness, problem solving, innovation and life-long learning in an ever-changing networked economy." ~ Don Tapscott
• "Collaboration is the best way to work. It's only way to work, really. Everyone's there because they have a set of skills to offer across the board." ~ Antony Starr