Peruse some graduation wishes for the new graduate. Yes, there’s lots to choose from. But, take a look and see if you find something you like.
The Best Graduation Wishes
Now that you’ve graduated, it’s now up to you to take that knowledge and do something great with it.
Congratulations! Take some time today to think about what you learned outside the classroom. You’ll probably find that much more valuable than what you learned in it.
With love and pride today and always.
Looks, brains, and now a degree? Watch out, world – this grad has it all!
Congratulations! Though you may now consider yourself learned, always remember that it’s important to remain a learner. Make learning a lifelong practice.
Graduating is not the end of hard work – it’s just a break before you get into the new and bigger challenges in life. Good luck!
Graduation is a time for celebration, a time of reflection, and a time to look ahead. Wishing you a bright future.
Graduate Messages
I wish you a great sense of accomplishment as you celebrate your hard work.
I knew you could do it, and I am proud of you. Congratulations!
I never doubted even for a moment that you would make it. Congratulations on making us proud! You did it!
You’re on the right path to a wonderful life. Congratulations graduate!
You’re on the way to the top! Stay humble and remember us normal human beings.
If you’re wondering how the last four years went so fast, you should see how quickly the rest of life flies by. Enjoy this moment. Congratulations.
Just remember that like college, all things that are worth it take time and effort. Continue to follow your dreams.
Check out 77 Funny Graduation Captions
Graduation Resource
This site is a resource for friends’ graduation wishes, family graduation wishes, sister’s graduation wishes, brother’s graduation wishes, niece’s graduation messages, nephew’s graduation greetings, son’s graduation wishes, daughter’s graduation wishes, nurses’ graduation wishes, and more. Also, graduation wishes for college and high school.
Funny Graduation Wishes
Congrats on getting through the easy part of life!
Welcome to the real world.
High school was so last year.
ConGRADulations!
May your great college memories last longer than your student loan payments.
Way to go, Bro!
My deepest condolences on the end of your school life.
Call it graduation, call it commencement or, in your case, call it a MIRACLE!
It just got real.
Congrats — now you’re old.
Greetings For Graduation
They say school is like toilet paper – you only miss it when it’s gone.
Just think: now you get to add some initials after your name on official publications.
No Child Left Behind really does work!
Grad: you can’t imagine the sense of relief we’re feeling right now.
I always sensed you would barely graduate. Congratulations grad!
Congratulations to me for sitting through that long graduation ceremony.
Graduation equals smart people wearing stupid hats!
Respect your elders. We graduated without Wikipedia.
Just remember, bosses, don’t accept notes from your mother.
4 years, 3 books, and 210 keggers! Congratulations, big shooter!
Short Greetings
Hip, hip, hooray for the graduate!
Congrats on your outstanding achievement!
Graduate to the finer things. Congrats buddy!
May today hold the promise of many great tomorrows!
Proceed with great purpose – but first, take some time to enjoy!
We’re so proud of the woman you’ve become.
A time to remember and a time to celebrate. Let’s get this party started!
An investment in yourself that will pay huge dividends.
Graduation is only the beginning! The sky is the limit!
Oh, the places you’ll go!
Best wishes for your future! Congratulations!
Good luck in all of your endeavors!
Hats off to graduation!
Serious accomplishment; silly hat! You go, girl!
Graduation Wishes and Greetings
Congratulations! We are very proud of you.
Congratulations! Your accomplishment and hard work have paid off.
Our pride inside is about to burst. Well done, graduate!
Congratulations! You’ve shown that you can be a successful student. Now be sure to continue to be one in every aspect of your life.
Pursue your dreams and reach for the stars! You can do it!
The world is ready for someone like you!
Continue to learn as a life learner, and you’ll graduate life successfully.
Be glad, be a grad.
We wish you courage as you step towards new challenges in your life. Congrats.
You get to wear a funny hat. All your hard work has paid off, and now the hat is yours. Congratulations.
You Did It!
Your most significant learning from college: 24 hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Bam!
You have not only graduated from high school. You have graduated into adulthood. Wishing you the best things in your future to come. Congratulations graduate.
You once had a dream, but today you’re an achiever. Congratulations on this extraordinary graduation day!
You studied hard and showed us how it’s done. Congratulations on your graduation.
We’re so proud of the person you’ve become.
It’s official: you’re now too cool for school!
Your combination of hard work, effort, and passion enabled you to fulfill this dream. Congratulations.
Your graduation is a great achievement, but that’s nothing compared to what life has in store for you next, with even bigger challenges and opportunities.
Your graduation is a momentous occasion that you will remember for the rest of your life. Congratulations, and here’s to the next step!
Your graduation is only a glimpse of what lies ahead in your bright future. Wishing you the very best for the coming years.
Graduation Wishes and Sayings
Dear (fill in name), you have made your family and friends very proud. I wish you the best of luck in the future. Hats off to the graduate!
You not only graduated, but you also did it with flying colors! You’re the best!
Phinally Done!
Four years have gone by, and you just keep getting better.
Good luck in all of your endeavors!
Spread your wings and fly!
You’ll be graduating to the finer things!
Graduation is only the beginning.
It’s a time to learn, grow, and share. Congrats!
Today is your day, graduate!
Today we celebrate your achievement!
Welcome to the working world!
You’re now hotter by one degree!
Now, this is the part where you find out who you are.
Shoot for the moon!
Success will be yours!
Graduation Card Sayings
The future awaits!
Looking forward to the future
Never forget your alma mater.
Pursue our dreams with your whole being.
The future is yours.
Your dreams will all come true!
Chase your dreams and continue to pursue excellence where you go. Congratulations!
Education is a remarkable tool – It enables you to do wonderful things that can catapult you to great success. Congratulations on your graduation, and all the best for the future.
Getting up early for class, going to bed late after assignments, stressed by exams – but now all your effort and determination have paid off. Congratulations!
Graduating is certainly a milestone, but life is the biggest learning experience of them all! Congratulations on your accomplishment.
For College
We are so proud of all that you’ve accomplished. March on!
The promise of future success is just around the corner.
To old friends and new beginnings!
Success will be yours. Keep on keeping on.
Always take pride in your work! Congrats!
Spread your wings and fly.
The tassel is worth the hassle.
Switch the tassel to the other side – you’ve done it!
The future just called, and it’s waiting for YOU!
Today we celebrate your achievement. You deserve all the accolades!
We are so proud of you
Graduation Quotes
Take time to remember and time to celebrate!
As one experience comes to an end, another begins.
You’ve done great, and you’ll do great!
Believe in your dreams!
Best wishes for your future
To new beginnings!
You have arrived!
Reach for the stars!
Graduation Speech
(Editor’s Note: This is the gold standard of all commencement addresses. Read and learn.)
Steven Jobs Commencement Address at Stanford in 2005
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
My Parents
So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later, I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
Cont.
It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example.
Reed College
Reed College, at that time, offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus, every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, and about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, and artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course, it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward ten years later.
Connecting Dots
Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky – I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents’ garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation – the Macintosh – a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired.
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually, we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30, I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
Uncertainty
I really didn’t know what to do for a few months – I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly – I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
Next
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the world’s first computer-animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
Fired from Apple
I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.
About Death
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
Cancer
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is the doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family – It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening, I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach, and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas, and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a scarce form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery, and I’m fine now.
Facing Death
This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you, but someday not too long from now; you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Live your own life
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. 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. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Last Issue of The Whole Earth Catalog
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it was the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off – Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
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