Commencement Speech Quotes & Sayings

And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art. — Neil Gaiman

Read. Read all the time. Read as a matter of principle, as a matter of self-respect. Read as a nourishing staple of life." (Wellesly High School commencement speech, "You Are Not Special", 6-12) — Teacher David McCullough

He needed to sort this out - needed to get her to just look at him again, so he could try to explain that he hadn't been prepared. Having her touch the tattoo that told the story of what he'd done and how he'd lost Lyria . . . He hadn't been ready for what he felt in that moment. The desire hadn't been what shook him at all. It was just . . . Aelin had driven him insane these past few weeks, and yet he hadn't considered what it would be like to have her look at him with interest. — Sarah J. Maas

Two things I've learned: 1) you simply cannot change someone's mind on certain issues and 2) some issues are so important you cannot stop trying to. — J.S.B. Morse

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free. — Frederick Douglass

In a now famous commencement speech at Stanford University, Steve Jobs urged the graduating class to "stay hungry. Stay foolish." Never let go of your appetite to go after new ideas, new experiences, and new adventures. Compete with yourself, not with others. Judge yourself on what is your personal best and you'll accomplish more than you could ever have imagined. Life stops for no one, so keep moving. Stay awake and stay alive. — Sophia Amoruso

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

We are, all of us, exploring a world none of us understands ... searching for a more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating mode of living ... for the integrity, the courage to be whole, living in relation to one another in the full poetry of existence. The struggle for an integrated life existing in an atmosphere of communal trust and respect is one with desperately important political and social consequences ... Fear is always with us, but we just don't have time for it.
-Commencement Speech, Wellesley 1969 — Hillary Rodham Clinton

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement. — J.K. Rowling

Other crack teams get bat boomerangs and wall-climbing powers; we get Aquatruck. — Cassandra Clare

The second guy I met on the Internet was Tom, who I dated for around 6 months, which is by far the longest relationship I've ever had as an adult. We long distance dated mostly, chatting everyday for a long time on FB chat and Skype. It's hard to imagine a more genuinely caring and kind individual. I owe a lot to him. — Marie Calloway

You will never see a U-Haul behind a hearse, — Denzel Washington

Because I come from that old-school optics environment, I know stuff about depth of field and camera movement and things that are not necessarily a part of the curriculum for people who started on a box and have never done anything that wasn't on a box. — John Dykstra

I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life. — J.K. Rowling

In the inky stillness of the next morning, Lisette woke up and dressed quietly in the silks her elderly mother still sent her from Paris- cool slippery things that made her feel like she was covering herself with fresh air. For a while, after she left Paris, Lisette threw away her mother's packages on principle. Lisette was not the same vain pretty girl her mother had once known. But then Lisette started making an exception for the lingerie. It was not vain if no one but herself saw her wear them. She then put on a blue dress and a freshly laundered apron that smelled like lemongrass soap Eby used for the camp's sheets and towels, the only soap that could take out the damp mustiness that wanted to cling to everything in this place. — Sarah Addison Allen

I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister. — J.K. Rowling

If you are preaching on the first commandment ("Thou shalt have no other gods before me") or Ephesians 5:5 (which calls greed idolatry) or any of the several hundred other places in the Bible that speak of idols, you could quote David Foster Wallace, the late postmodern novelist. In his Kenyon College commencement speech he argues eloquently and forcefully that "everyone worships. The only choice we get is what to worship."32 He goes on to say everyone has to "tap real meaning in life," and whatever you use to do that, whether it is money, beauty, power, intellect, or something else, it will drive your life because it is essentially a form of worship. He enumerates why each form of worship does not merely make you fragile and exhausted but can "eat you alive." If you lay out his argument in support of fundamental biblical teaching, even the most secular audience will get quiet and keep listening to what you say next. — Timothy J. Keller

Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world. — Ice Cube

Good tennis players are those who beat other tennis players, and a good shot during play is one the opponent can't return. But that's not a truth about life or excellence -- it's a truth about tennis. We've created an artificial structure in which one person can't succeed without doing so at someone else's expense, and then we accuse anyone who prefers other kinds of activities of being naive because "there can be only one best -- you're it or you're not," as the teacher who delivered that much-admired you're-not-special commencement speech declared. You see the sleight of hand here? The question isn't whether everyone playing a competitive game can win or whether every student can be above average. Of course they can't. The question that we're discouraged from asking is why our games are competitive -- or our students are compulsively ranked against one another -- in the first place. — Alfie Kohn

I grew up very differently than a lot of other people in my hometown in Mississippi. But I can't imagine my life any other way. I flew home and surprised my best friend at his graduation, and I remember turning to my mom and saying, 'My graduation was so much cooler than this.' I had Melissa Joan Hart give my commencement speech. — Taylor Spreitler

Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice.
[Stanford University commencement speech, 2005] — Steve Jobs

[Soho] is all things to all men, catering comprehensively for those needs which money can buy. You see it as you wish. An agreeable place to dine; a cosmopolitan village tucked away behind Piccadilly with its own mysterious village life, one of the best shopping centres for food in London, the nastiest and most sordid nursery of crime in Europe. Even the travel journalists, obsessed by its ambiguities, can't make up their minds. — P.D. James

George W. Bush gave a commencement speech at Southern Methodist University this weekend. It was pretty inspirational. He said, 'As I like to tell the 'C' students, you too can be president.' Even George W. Bush has George W. Bush comedy material in his act. — Jimmy Fallon

Unlike any other creature on this planet, human beings can learn and understand without having experienced. They can think themselves into other peoples' places. Of course, this is a power like my brand of fictional magic that is morally neutral. One might use such a power to manipulate or control, just as much as to understand or sympathize. And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or peer inside cages. They can close their hearts and minds to any suffering that does not touch them personally. They can refuse to know. I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think that they have any fewer nightmares than I do. — J.K. Rowling

Yesterday, a beautiful day ... I was talking to [an older] woman who said that she wouldn't want to be me for anything in the world. She wouldn't want to live today and look ahead to what it is she sees because she's afraid. Fear is always with us but we just don't have time for it. Not now. HILLARY RODHAM, Wellesley commencement speech, 1969 — Rebecca Traister

Neil Gaiman's "Make Good Art" commencement speech, which he gave at Philadelphia's University of the Arts. I've watched the video dozens of times on YouTube during rough periods. Our mutual favorite portion is "The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right." And, yes, — Timothy Ferriss

When you connect with a cause, it's like falling in love. — Debra Winger

If I were asked to give a commencement speech (which I'll never be), I'd say basically: They're all gonna laugh at you. Life is pretty much like Carrie's prom. So ... stay secret. — Mark Leyner

I know where I am going now with art. I have found myself. Yvonne Rust 1994, aged 72. — Theresa Sjoquist

I think it's the people who have no doubt that every word they put down is gold that probably don't write very well. — Dean Koontz

Classroom teaching withholds nothing. I say to my young students every year, "I know how to add two numbers, but I'm not going to tell you." And they laugh and shout, "No!" That's so absurd, so unthinkable. What do I have that I would not give to you?
Bringing nothing, producing nothing, expecting nothing, withholding nothing
what does that remind you of?
Is this a bizarre occurrence that will go into The Journal of Irreproducible Results?
Or is it something that happens every day, all the time, all over the world,
and is based not on gain and fame, but on love. — Margaret Edson

Live your fear." Why didn't we teach kids that? Why wasn't that in a graduation speech? Commencement speakers should start telling the truth: "You're going to fuck up, but most of the time, that's all right. — Mara Wilson

The commencement speech is not, I think, a wholly satisfactory manifestation of our culture. — John Kenneth Galbraith

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] — Anna Quindlen

We were sexual targets, marked as eternal sluts for exploring the desires only acceptable in men. — Maggie Young

As far as I can tell, it's just about letting the universe know what you want and then working toward it while letting go of how it comes to pass. — Jim Carrey

Sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do. — Oprah Winfrey

President Bush delivered a commencement speech at a university in Wisconsin. A very inspirational speech. Apparently Bush told the students, 'You can do anything in life if your parents work hard enough.' — Conan O'Brien

Only another writer, someone who had worked his heart out on a good book which sold three thousand copies, could appreciate the thrill that overcame me one April morning in 1973 when Dean Rivers of our small college in Georgia appeared at my classroom door — James A. Michener

I look into the future and see my brother's face, impossibly middle-aged. His daughter has rejected all of his values, and stands now on the dais of a major university, the valedictorian preparing to deliver her commencement speech. What will she think when her dad stands in the aisle, releasing a hog call and raising his T-shirt to reveal the jiggling message painted upon his bare stomach? Will she turn away, as my father predicts, or might she remember all the nights she awoke to discover him: this slob, this lump, this silly drooling toy asleep at her feet. — David Sedaris

We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better. — J.K. Rowling

Dedication Chapter 1 - Introduction Chapter 2 - Pray and Live Chapter 3 - At the Threshold of God's Time Chapter 4 - Where God Dwells Chapter 5 - All the Trees of the Forest Sing for Joy Chapter 6 - At Home in the Psalms Afterword - My Life with the Psalms Acknowledgments Scripture Index About the Author Also by N. T. Wright Credits Copyright About the Publisher Chapter 1 — N. T. Wright