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Graduation Quotes

33 Graduation Quotes That Earned High Honors

If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.
Mario Andretti
All you need is love.
The Beatles
That’s how change happens. One gesture. One person. One moment at a time.
Libba Bray
Do not dwell in the past, don’t dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.
Buddha
Life moves pretty fast if you don’t stop and look around once in a while you could miss it.
Ferris Bueller
Wheresoever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius
Dream as if you’ll live forever, live as if you’ll die today.
James Dean
All of our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney
The secret of success in life is for a man to be ready for his opportunity when it comes.
Benjamin Disraeli
May your hand always be busy, may your feet always be swift, May your heart always be sung and may you stay forever young.
Bob Dylan
We must walk consciously only part way toward our goal, and then leap in the dark to our success.
Henry David Thoreau
Why wait any longer for the world to begin.
Bob Dylan
You can’t build a reputation on what you are going to do.
Henry Ford
You will find the key to success under the alarm clock.
Benjamin Franklin
Glass, china and reputation are easily cracked, and never well mended.
Benjamin Franklin

The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination.
Albert Einstein
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Albert Einstein
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you anywhere.
Albert Einstein
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
In a gentle way, you can shake the world.
Ghandi
For beautiful eyes, look for the good in others; for beautiful lips, speak only words of kindness; and for poise, walk with the knowledge that you are never alone.
Audrey Hepburn
I hope your dreams take you to the corners of your smiles, to the highest of your hopes, to the windows of your opportunities, and to the most special places your heart has ever known.
Unknown
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Unknown
An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.
Author unknown
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
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
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

Cont.

Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!
Louisa May Alcott
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Mahatma Ghandi
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Spread joy. Chase your wildest dreams.
Patch Adams
Ralph Waldo Emerson once asked what we would do if the stars only came out once every thousand years. No one would sleep that night, of course, We would be ecstatic, delirious, made rapturous by the glory of God. Instead the stars come out every night, and we watch television.
Paul Hawken
Life is not about warming yourself by the fire, life is about building the fire. And generosity is the match – If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap, but if you want happiness for a lifetime, help somebody.
Larry Luchino

Graduation Quotations for Son

Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, the mind can achieve.
Napoleon Hill

As you walk down the fairway of life you must smell the roses, for you only get to play one round.
Ben Hogan

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.
Bobby Kennedy

Do not pray for easier lives, pray to be stronger men.
John F. Kennedy

Whatever you are, be a good one.
Abraham Lincoln

Always bear in mind that your own resolution to succeed is more important than any other.
Abraham Lincoln

I’m an idealist: I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.
Carl Sandburg

Everything has been figured out except how to live.
Sartre

Graduation Quotes 2016

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.
“Closing Time” by Semisonic

Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive that is youer than you.
Dr. Seuss

When you leave here, don’t forget why you came.
Adlai Stevenson

If at first you don’t succeed, do it like your mother told you.
Unknown

Congratulations Graduation Messages

For Daughter

The stars are beautiful because of a flower that cannot be seen.
The Little Prince

We all take different paths in life, but no matter where we go, we take a little of each other everywhere.
Tim McGraw

The brave may not live forever, but the cautious do not live at all.
Princess Diaries

Don’t let your dreams be dreams.
Unknown

The light that shines on you shows where you are, the light that shines in you shows where you will go.
Unknown

Live simply, love deeply.
Unknown

The key to happiness is having dreams; the key to success is making them come true.
Unknown

My Kid

Best to take the moment present as a present at the moment.
Unknown

We laughed until we had to cry, we loved right down to our last goodbye, but over the years we’ll smile and recall, for just one moment…we had it all!
Unknown

The bravest thing you can do is be yourself.
Unknown

There will come a time when you believe everything is finished…that will be the beginning.
Unknown

For Sister

Moving on is simple. It’s what we leave behind that’s hard.
Unknown

Long ago, in a time that has faded from memory, a mother’s tears forged the bridge that, ever after, connected the power of the living every changing world to the human heart.
Unknown

The choices you don’t make are as important as the ones we do make.
Unknown

Use what talents you possess: the wood would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang best.
Henry Van Dyke

It’s just life so keep dancing through.
Wicked

Memory is a way of holding onto the things you love, the things you are, the things you never want to lose.
The Wonder Years

For Yearbook

All our dreams can come true…if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B.F. Skinner

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!
Andy McIntyre

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt

To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you too may one day be president of the United States.
George W. Bush

Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.
Ella Fitzgerald

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

NOTE: Sometimes the best graduation quotes are short and to the point. Other graduation quotes take some time to get there, but the wait is worthwhile. Try incorporating some graduation quotes into your message to your favorite graduate. Find the right quote, and add the right message, and your congratulations greeting will stand out.

For Brother

Education is the key to unlocking the world, a passport to freedom.
Oprah Winfrey

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela

Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path then by all means you should follow that.
Ellen Degeneres

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

Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
John Wooden

Graduation Sayings for Invitations

Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Gabrielle Coco Chanel

If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game.
Ben Bernanke

If you aren’t fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
Vince Lombardi – for more inspirational Vince Lombardi quotes

It is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o’clock.
Woody Allen

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
e.e. cummings

Graduation Quote Ideas

The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt

The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein

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

The most rewarding things in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.
Arnold Palmer

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
Aristotle

Graduation Quotations

The tassel’s worth the hassle!
Author Unknown

The things taught in schools and colleges are not an education, but the means of education.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
Art Linkletter

To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein

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.
JK Rowling – See more insights from J.K. Rowling.

Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.

What lies behind us, and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Best Graduation Words of Wisdom

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

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once, but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.
Michelle Obama

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
Steve Jobs

Inspire

Take action. Every story you’ve ever connected with, every leader you’ve ever admired, every puny little thing that you’ve ever accomplished is the result of taking action. You have a choice. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life.
Bradley Withford

In life you make the small decisions with your head and the big decisions with your heart.
Omid Kordestani

And now go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.
Neil Gaiman

——

J.K. Rowling’s Harvard Speech

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is “thank you.” Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honor, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

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.

Writing

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.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

JK Rowling

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

Cont.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Cont.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

Rowling

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, 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.

Author

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. 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 fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

London

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries – I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

Cont.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Graduation Images and Memes

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

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 to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; and they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; (and) if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. 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.

I am nearly finished. 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, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took 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.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.

Thank-you very much.

——-

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