Graduation Quotations

Guest Author - Danielle Hollister

"Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors! "
-- Louisa May Alcott
"Your schooling may be over, but remember that your education still continues."
-- Anonymous
"The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money."
-- Anonymous
"The young graduate is discovering that among the necessaries of life, the most important is living."
-- Anonymous
"There is no need to reach high for the stars. They are already within you - just reach deep into yourself!"
-- Anonymous
"All that stands between the graduate and the top of the ladder is the ladder."
-- Anonymous
"50% of the high school graduates in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class."
-- Anonymous
"Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these."
-- Susan B. Anthony
"Education is the best provision for old age. "
-- Aristotle
"It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
-- Aristotle
"The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet."
-- Aristotle
"It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge."
-- Brooks Atkinson
"A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep."
-- W.H. Auden
"Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present."
-- Roger Babson
"The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after. "
-- Newton D. Baker
"If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door."
-- Milton Berle
"I won't say there aren't any Harvard graduates who have never asserted a superior attitude. But they have done so to our great embarrassment and in no way represent the Harvard I know."
-- Derek Bethune, President, Harvard
"...Yes, the lectures are optional. Graduation is also Optional."
-- Bob Bickford
"Your families are extremely proud of you. You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money."
-- Gary Bolding
"Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed."
-- Erma Bombeck
"You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world."
-- Tom Brokaw
"Education make a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive, easy to govern, but impossible to enslave."
-- Lord Brougham
"Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars."
-- Les Brown
"Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm."
-- Winston Churchill
"Wherever you go, go with all your heart."
-- Confucius
"People will frighten you about a graduation....They use words you don't hear often... 'And we wish you Godspeed.' It is a warning, Godpeed. It means you are no longer welcome here at these prices."
-- Bill Cosby
"A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues."
-- Archibald Cox
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams, live live as you've always imagined."
-- Brittany Crawford
"Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine."
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo
"Develop a passion for learning. If you do, you will never cease to grow."
-- Anthony J. D'Angelo
"The wit of a graduate student is like champagne. Canadian champagne."
-- Robertson Davies
"The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm."
-- Fred Dehner
"The secret of success is constancy of purpose."
-- Benjamin Disraeli
"The most important aspect of freedom of speech is freedom to learn. All education is a continuous dialogue ~ questions and answers that pursue every problem on the horizon. That is the essence of academic freedom. "
-- William O. Douglas
"Go for it now. The future is promised to no one."
-- Wayne Dyer
"The function of the university is not simply to teach bread winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. "
-- W.E.B. Du Bois
"The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education."
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you."
"Be careful to leave your sons well instructed rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed are better than the wealth of the ignorant. "
-- Epictetus
"There is just one life for each of us: our own."
-- Euripides
"Education is the process by which the individual relates himself to the universe, give himself citizenship in the changing world, share's the race's mind and enfranchises his own soul. "
-- John H. Finley
"I think sleeping was my problem in school. If school had started at 4:00 in the afternoon, I'd be a college graduate today."
-- George Foreman
"My father always told me, "Find a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life."
-- Jim Fox
"To accomplish great things, we must dream as well as act. "
-- Anatole France
"At commencement you wear your square-shaped mortarboards. My hope is that from time to time you will let your minds be bold, and wear sombreros."
-- Paul Freund
"It's not your blue blood, your pedigree or your college degree. It's what you do with your life that counts."
-- Millard Fuller
"Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps."
-- David Lloyd George
"If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you."
-- Robert Goheen
"The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving."
-- Russell Green
"A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience. "
-- A. Whitney Griswold
"Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars."
-- Richard Halliburton
"The great value of formal education is that it is designed to foreshorten human experience. It endeavors with ease and economy to bring each succeeding generation up to date with respect to the past, and to make it at home in the world. In this sense, it prepares each generation for life. "
-- Virgil M. Hancher
"The man of culture is one of the poorest mortals alive. For simple pedantry and want of good sense no man is his equal. No assumption is too unreal, no end is too unpractical for him."
-- Frederic Harrison
"The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows."
-- Sydney Harris
"There is a good reason they call these ceremonies "commencement exercises." Graduation is not the end; it's the beginning."
-- Orrin Hatch
"The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit."
-- Nelson Henderson
"It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves."
-- Edmund Hillary
Graduation Cap and Diploma
"The supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things ~ the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit. "
-- Samuel Johnson
"Great minds have purposes, others have wishes."
-- Washington Irving
"The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match, each one of you is a fuse."
-- Ed Koch
"We can't take any credit for our talents. It's how we use them that counts."
-- Madeleine L'Engle
"The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate."
-- Doug Larson
"Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates."
-- A. Lawrence Lowell
"If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!"
-- Andy McIntyre
"Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course~because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you. "
-- Alice Drue Miller
"To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks."
-- A. A. Milne
"The elective system ... offered a bewildering freedom of choice, leaving some graduates with the impression that they had nibbled at dozens of canapés of knowledge and never had their fill."
-- Ted Morgan
"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius."
-- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
"From the first day in school until the day I graduated, everyone gave me one hundred plus in art. Well, where do you go in life? You go to the place where you got one hundred plus."
-- Louise Nevelson
"Every path serves a purpose."
-- Gene Oliver
"A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success."
-- Robert Orben
"Graduation is only a concept. In real life every day you graduate. Graduation is a process that goes on until the last day of your life. If you can grasp that , you'll make a difference."
-- Arie Pencovici
"Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money."
-- William Lyon Phelps
"The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future. "
-- Plato
"What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God."
-- Eleanor Powell
"Teachers open the door, but you must enter by yourself."
-- Proverb
"A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success."
-- Robert Purvis
"A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad."
-- Theodore Roosevelt
"When you feel discouraged or simply lazy, as is bound to happen sometimes, remember the millions of people in the world who have not had your privilege. Remember the poor and obscure lives of those countless millions who suffer from every sort of deprivation and frequently find themselves the unwilling victim of wars, and a variety of cruelties, perpetuated by man on man. Is it not significant that the first bid for self realization, among the poor and downtrodden, is to assert their right to education? "
-- Jehan Sadat
"The modern school without systematic lectures turns out many graduates who lack retention. No sooner has the sound of the word left their teacher's lips, the subject has been forgotten. . ."
-- Arthur Schomburg
"We know what we are, but know not what we may be."
-- Shakespeare
"Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
-- George Bernard Shaw
"There are no shortcuts to any place worth going."
-- Beverly Sills
"A fellow told me he was going to hang-glider school. He said, 'I've been going for three months.' I said, 'How many successful jumps do you need to make before you graduate?' He said, 'All of them.'"
-- Red Skeleton
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
-- B.F. Skinner
"Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe--the open sesame to every soul."
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
"The human spirit needs to accomplish, to achieve, to triumph to be happy."
-- Ben Stein
"At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry."
-- Gloria Steinem
"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind."
-- Dr. Seuss
"You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who'll decide where to go."
-- Dr. Seuss
"Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten."
-- B.F. Skinner
"The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder."
-- Ralph W. Sockman
"I have learned this at least by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dream, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagines, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. "
-- Henry David Thoreau
"Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
-- Henry David Thoreau
"'These are days you'll remember.' If you recall nothing else from your graduation ceremony, remember you heard the New Jersey Governor quote from 10,000 Maniacs."
-- Christine Todd, NJ governor
"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
"Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated."
-- Garry Trudeau
"You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it."
-- John Updike
"A milestone passed, new things begun, dreams as shining as the sun, a goal achieved, a victory won! That's Graduation!"
-- Unknown
"School's out, Memories past, Don't ever doubt, Our friendship will last."
-- Unknown
"The road to your dreams is paved by the knowledge from your teachers, the wisdom of your mentors, and the passion of your soul."
-- Unknown
"If at first you don't succeed, do it like your mother told you. "
-- Unknown
"Put your future in good hands - your own."
-- Unknown
"Your schooling may be over, but remember that your education still continues."
-- Unknown
"We cannot direct the wind but we can adjust the sails. "
-- Unknown
"The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money."
-- Unknown
"Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable."
-- Wendy Wasserstein
"It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days."
-- Isabel Waxman
"Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught. "
-- Oscar Wilde

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