Best Commencement Speeches Quotes & Sayings

Without a good cultural policy, without adequate help, we will always have individualists, shooting stars who are rapidly forgotten or who stop painting for a more profitable occupation. — Ralph Allen

President Obama and Mitt Romney both gave commencement speeches over the last few days. Obama was like, 'You can be whatever you want to be,' while Romney was like, 'I can be whatever you want me to be.' — Jimmy Fallon

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

Americans live in a twilight world between a sense of loss and a sense of resigned acceptance. — Max Lerner

if one day you feel like crying...
call me
I don't promise that
I will make you laugh

But I can cry with you.

If one day you want to run away
Don't be afraid to call me.
I don't promise to ask you to stop,

But I can run with you.

If one day you don't want to listen to anyone
call me
i promise to be there for you
but i also promise to remain quiet

But...
If one day you call
and there is no answer...
come fast to see me..

Perhaps I need you. — Robert J. Lavery

Horrible types, specialists in the One, builders of middle-class castles, and upper-class Usher houses, writers of boring Commencement speeches, creepy otherworldly types, worse than Pope Paul, academics who resembled gray jars, and who would ruin a whole state like Tennessee if put into it; people totally unable to merge into the place where they live
they could live in a valley for years and never become the valley — Robert Bly

The devil take me, if I think anything but love to be the object of love. — Henry Fielding

This relation between the mind and matter is not fancied by some poet, but stands in the will of God, and so is free to be known by all men. — Ralph Waldo Emerson

There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. — David Foster Wallace

One must search diligently to find laudatory comments on education (other than those pious platitudes which are fodder for commencement speeches). It appears that most persons who have achieved fame and success in the world of ideas are cynical about formal education. These people are a select few, who often achieved success in spite of their education, or even without it. As has been said, the clever largely educate themselves, those less able aren't sufficiently clever or imaginative to benefit much from education. — Edward Gibbon