Quotes & Sayings About Graduation

Be present. I would encourage you with all my heart just to be present. Be present and open to the moment that is unfolding before you. Because, ultimately, your life is made up of moments. So don't miss them by being lost in the past or anticipating the future. — Jessica Lange

You will throughout your life have people who will tell you that you're not good enough. Maybe they're jealous. Maybe they think you aren't. Maybe they've had a bad day. But ultimately you have to believe in yourself. — Meredith Vieira

It is very common ... to tell graduates: dream and dream big. I say do more than that. When you dream you are in an unconscious state. It ends. You wake up. It's not real. — Roger Goodell

We are all in the process of becoming. — Audre Lorde

I did graduate with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1948. — Daniel J. Evans

Graduation is a big deal-bigger than getting a hole-in-one while golfing. People might think you're lying about the hole-in-one, but when you graduate, you get a diploma. — Anderson Cooper

Be careful who you call crazy. Some of us think it's a compliment. — Marilynn Dawson

Death is the Graduation of the Soul — Sylvia Browne

When anything huge happens to me, I always think, this isn't my moment, this is a moment. — Tig Notaro

I'm only asking you to stop every so often and turn off your mobile device, put down the Angry Birds and the Words with Friends and take a moment. Stop to look up and look around. Pause and check in with yourself - and spend a moment there. — Maria Shriver

Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do. — Daniel Greenberg

I got married three days after graduation, and the first thing I did what I was expected to do which was to work on a small newspaper. So we were in Chicago where my husband worked for the Chicago Sun-Times and we were having dinner with his editor and he said 'So what are you 'gonna do honey?' and I said 'I'm going to work on a newspaper', and he said 'I don't think so, because Newspaper Guild regulations said that I couldn't work on the same newspaper as my husband. — Madeleine Albright

Pausing allows you to take a beat to take a breath in your life. As everybody else is rushing around like a lunatic out there, I dare you to do the opposite. — Maria Shriver

You can only see progress when you start doing something, so don't expect anything without your efforts. — Auliq Ice

Be bold, be courageous, be your best. — Gabrielle Giffords

Upon graduation, go out into the world and try to find yourself. What do I mean by that? Read Socrates, no. Get a job? Not yet. Go out and do some crazy stuff. Don't hurt anybody including yourself, but take some risks. Travel a little bit. Make big mistakes that you have to apologize for. Do stuff that will make you relatable to the world. And whatever jobs you settle into, you will be better at it, for it. — Megyn Kelly

Most of us won't see one another after graduation, and even if we do it will be different. We'll be different. We'll be adults
cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes. — Lauren Oliver

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

I snicker, but the idea is momentarily appealing. Part of me is scared of leaving school. Part of me wants to go desperately. Tension of opposites. — Mitch Albom

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. — Abbott Lawrence Lowell

And God says to all of us, you are no chicken; you are an eagle. Fly, eagle, fly. And God wants us to shake ourselves, spread our pinions, and then lift off and soar and rise, and rise toward the confident and the good and the beautiful. Rise towards the compassionate and the gentle and the caring. Rise to become what God intends us to be-eagles, not chickens. — Desmond Tutu

As I am becoming older, the only thing that speeds up is time. — Alan Alda

We do believe in setting goals. We live by goals. In athletics we always have a goal. When we go to school, we have the goal of graduation and degrees. Our total existence is goal-oriented. We must have goals to make progress, encouraged by keeping records ... as the swimmer or the jumper or the runner does ... Progress is easier when it is timed, checked, and measured ... Goals are good. Laboring with a distant aim sets the mind in a higher key and puts us at our best. Goals should always be made to a point that will make us reach and strain. — Spencer W. Kimball

Do not ask if a man has been through college; ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Leaders aren't born they are made. And they are made just like anything else, through hard work. And that's the price we'll have to pay to achieve that goal, or any goal. — Vince Lombardi

I had the luxury of skipping the cabinet meeting to attend my daughter's graduation. So many people don't have the luxury of taking an hour away from the workplace to attend indispensable family commitments. We have to change that dynamic. — Thomas Perez

There is a good reason they call these ceremonies 'commencement exercises'. Graduation is not the end; it's the beginning. — Orrin Hatch

From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as something artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art. — Toni Morrison

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin. — Rita Levi-Montalcini

I will miss you
not because you taught me,
not because you helped me on all steps of education;
but only because
you made me a leader to lead as an perfect Electrical Engineer. — Hasil Paudyal

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it. — James Tobin

I fell in love with theater there, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting. — Olivia Wilde

I went to military college in Canada and graduated as an officer in the Navy but also as an engineer. — Marc Garneau

The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after. — Newton D. Baker

Go to it. Be bold. Be true. Be kind. Rotate your tires. Don't drink so much. There aren't going to be enough liver transplants to go around. — Richard Russo

For I dipped into the future, far as human eye could see, Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be. — Alfred Lord Tennyson

The secret of unleashing your true power is setting goals that are exciting enough that they truly inspire your creativity and ignite yourpassion. — Tony Robbins

You're never too old or too busy to continue your educatioan! — Eva Longoria

For most of us enlightenment is not a destination or graduation into a permanent higher state of consciousness, but a moment-by-moment experience constantly fluctuating between degrees of wholeness and limited consciousness. I like to call this enlightening-ment. — Jennifer Howard

When I was in college, my graduation thesis was called 'Female Directors.' I interviewed all of the important female directors from Mexico. There were four. That was it. — Patricia Riggen

Americans in particular are myopic. They're not traveling as much. When you were a college student, the next thing you would do on graduation was to take a year off and travel. That's what I did. I went to Indonesia. — Julie Taymor

After graduation, due to special circumstances and perhaps also to my character, I began to travel throughout America, and I became acquainted with all of it. Except for Haiti and Santo Domingo, I have visited, to some extent, all the other Latin American countries. Because of the circumstances in which I traveled, first as a student and later as a doctor, I came into close contact with poverty, hunger and disease; with the inability to treat a child because of lack of money; with the stupefaction provoked by the continual hunger and punishment, to the point that a father can accept the loss of a son as an unimportant accident, as occurs often in the downtrodden classes of our American homeland. And I began to realize at that time that there were things that were almost as important to me as becoming famous for making a significant contribution to medical science: I wanted to help those people. — Ernesto Che Guevara

My first class is biology. I can't find it and get my first demerit for wandering the hall. It is 8:50 in the morning. Only 699 days and 7 class periods until graduation. — Laurie Halse Anderson

You cannot help but learn more as take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is and old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. — John Updike

Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation ... 15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old. — Jack Dorsey

Don't always worry what your next line is going to be. — Dick Costolo

Not long after graduation I was teaching at an alternative school and already I had serious doubts about my career choice. My students were hellions. I'd been assaulted twice. My car had been vandalized. I had to testify in court against one of my students, and afterward - and purely for spite - I delivered her textbook and homework assignments to the juvenile detention facility. Not my finest moment, but I enjoyed it. — Tucker Elliot

You're not going to get very far in life based on what you already know. You're going to advance in life by what you're going to learn after you leave here. — Charlie Munger

Sucess is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it ... Err in the direction of kindness. — George Saunders

When I graduated from Santa Monica High in 1927, I was voted the girl most likely to succeed. I didn't realize it would take so long. — Gloria Stuart

Every in group distinguishes itself from the outgroup by some process of "going through the mill" or enduring sufferings which are subsequently worn as the proud badge of graduation — Alan W. Watts

I received $100 per week when I started working at the Globe after graduation. — Will McDonough

Death is a graduation. When we're taught all the things we came to teach, learned all the things we came to learn, then we're allowed to graduate. — Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

When I started singing as a freshman, I didn't sing for anybody - my parents or my friends. By the time I was a senior, the teacher asked me if I wanted to audition for a solo at my graduation. I was really nervous but I got it. — Toby Lightman

It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realised I'd become an actor. — James D'arcy

In a longitudinal study of college students, freshmen were evaluated for fixed mindsets or growth mindsets and then followed across their four years of enrollment. When the students with fixed mindsets encountered academic challenges such as daunting projects or low grades, they gave up, while the students with growth mindsets responded by working harder or trying new strategies. Rather than strengthening their skills and toughening their resolve, four years of college left the students with fixed mindsets feeling less confident. The feelings they most associated with school were distress, shame, and upset. Those with growth mindsets performed better in school overall and, at graduation time, they reported feeling confident, determined, enthusiastic, inspired, and strong. — Meg Jay

I believe in the principle that I can make a difference in this world. It may be ever so small, but it will count for the greater good. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated. — Erma Bombeck

My father, who was from a wealthy family and highly educated, a lawyer, Yale and Columbia, walked out with the benefit of a healthy push from my mother, a seventh grade graduate, who took a typing course and got a secretarial job as fast as she could. — George Weinberg

The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit. — Nelson Henderson

Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life. — Daniel Levitin

John and Jenny's planes arrived in Rome only hours apart. They had never imagined, when they walked away from each other graduation night 1960, it would be forty years and five thousand miles away before they would meet again. — Thomas Allen

I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA. — John Kiriakou

But you're a prisoner," said Thorne.
"I prefer damsel in distress," she murmured.
One side of Thorne's mouth quirked up, into that perfect half smile he'd had in his graduation photo. A look that was a little bit devious, and all sorts of charming.
Cress's heart stopped, but if they noticed her melting into her chair, they didn't say anything. — Marissa Meyer

Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University. — Harold E. Varmus

But where was he going to go, exactly? It was not considered the thing to look panicked or even especially concerned about graduation, but everything about the world after Brakebills felt dangerously vague and under-thought to Quentin. What was he going to do? What exactly? Every ambition he'd ever had in his life had been realized the day he was admitted to Brakebills, and he was struggling to formulate a new one with any kind of practical specificity. This wasn't Fillory, where there was some magical war to be fought. There was no Watcherwoman to be rooted out, no great evil to be vanquished, and without that everything else seemed so mundane and penny-ante. No one would come right out and say it, but the worldwide magical ecology was suffering from a serious imbalance: too many magicians, not enough monsters. — Lev Grossman

The longer our graduation lines are today, the shorter our unemployment lines will be tomorrow. — George H. W. Bush

CALUMNUS, n. A graduate of the School for Scandal. — Ambrose Bierce

Real leadership comes from the quiet nudging of an inner voice. It comes from realizing that the time has come to move beyond waiting to doing. — Madeleine Albright

The great thing about taking big chances when you're younger is you have less to lose, and you don't know as much. So you take big swings. — Amy Poehler

From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world. — Dick Cheney

When we are fully mindful of the transience of things - an impending return home from an overseas adventure, a graduation, our child boarding the school bus for the first day of kindergarten, a close colleague changing jobs, a move to a new city - we are more likely to appreciate [be grateful for] and savor the remaining time that we do have. Although bittersweet experiences also make us sad, it is this sadness that prompts us, instead of taking it for granted, to come to appreciate the positive aspects of our vacation, colleague, or hometown; it's 'now or never.' — Sonja Lyubomirsky

They said, we have education, but what about jobs? So I started telling them, you should be taking a pledge, and the pledge should be: 'I'm not a job seeker; I'm a job giver.' Prepare yourself to be a job giver. — Muhammad Yunus

After graduating in the summer of 1980, I knew I wanted my life to count. — Donna Rice

You are the guy who'll decide where to go. — Dr. Seuss

It's harder to build than destroy. To build is to engage and change. In jazz, we call progressing harmonies changes. Changes are like obstacles on a speed course. They demand your attention and require you to be present. They are coming ... they are here ... and then they are gone. It's how life comes. Each moment is a procession from the future into the past and the sweet spot is always the present. Live in that sweet spot. Be present. — Wynton Marsalis

Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people being necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties; and as these depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people, it shall be the duty of legislators and magistrates in all future periods of this commonwealth to cherish the interests of literature and the sciences ... — John Adams

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened. — Ted Nelson

Like many people, I consider myself an incurable romantic, and there is a part of me that will always believe in walking off into the sunset to live happily ever after. When I was younger, like many children, I assumed I would get married, live in a nice house, and have a couple of kids. I also assumed this very traditional achievement would bring me endless happiness and romance. So much so, that during my college years I considered girls engaged by graduation to be the epitome of success. Perhaps needless to say, I was not one of those girls. — Robi Ludwig

Students and invited speakers do not shed their constitutional rights when they step up to the graduation podium. Expressing faith in God does not disqualify a student from delivering a graduation message. Being designated as valedictorian or salutatorian is an honor, and students chosen for that honor should be free to share their gratitude to God with their fellow students and family members. — Mathew Staver

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen "unplug" for at least two hours each day.
location 6374 — Alena Graedon

Success is the end product. — Lailah Gifty Akita

College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life. — Paul Ryan

Maybe it's a symptom of a small town - and Gentry certainly was that - but for some, even after graduation, high school never really ends. — Matt Abrams

College atheletes used to get a degree in bringing your pencil. — Ruby Wax

At the top of his file was a three-dimensional holograph scanned in from his military graduation. Cress preferred it to the infamous prison photo that had become so popular, the one in which he was winking at the camera, because in the holograph he was wearing a freshly pressed uniform with shiny silver buttons and a confident, one-sided grin.
Seeing that smile, Cress melted.
Every. Time.
"Hello again, Mr. Thorne," she whispered to the holograph. — Marissa Meyer

I went to a public high school, and after graduation, college wasn't really much of an option for me. I didn't believe I had the money or the grades at the time, so I continued to work and save money to support my acting career. — Christie Laing

When you start off, you have to deal with the problems of failure. You need to be thick-skinned, to learn that not every project will survive. — Neil Gaiman

After we graduate tonight, we no longer have to let society happen to us. We get to create our own. — Rachel Maddow

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I'd be a lousy businessman, and if I didn't give acting a try I'd regret it for the rest of my life. — Peter Gallagher

I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, 'Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won't get you.' I love wearing that t-shirt. — Suzie Ivy

You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library! — Barack Obama

Sometimes the 'day' you're dreaming for never comes. Take control of your future and start now. — Auliq Ice

I was actually pretty miserable in high school. I couldn't wait for it to be over. And when it finally was, I remember sitting at graduation with all these classmates getting nostalgic and emotional already and all I could think was, "Get me out of here. I never want to see you people again." So it's ironic that I spend half my day putting myself back there by choice [while writing]. — Sarah Dessen

So, kiss the girl. Buy the dress. Take a vacation. Join the circus. Order the fried frog legs. Try out for the play. Learn to snowboard. Do something that scares the shit out of you. Or something that makes you happy. Or something that makes you cry. Whatever it is, do something that makes you feel. Because feeling nothing is no way to go through life. — Valerie Thomas

Work hard but work smart. Always. Every day. Nothing is handed to you and nothing is easy. You're not owed anything ... No job or task is too small or beneath you. If you want to get ahead, volunteer to do the things no one else wants to do, and do it better. Be a sponge. Be open and learn. — Bobbi Brown

After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression. — Andy Behrman

My daughter finished high school the same month I got my master's degree. I'm glad I didn't know when I gave birth to her at 21 what it would cost in terms of time, money and sacrifice to bring her to that graduation day. — Regina Brett

Without ambition no conquests are made, and no business created. Ambition is the root of all achievement. — James A. Champy

I found that nothing in life is worthwhile unless you take risks. — Denzel Washington