Graduation Quotations

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.

Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.

We must use time wisely and forever realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.

It's easier to go down a hill than up it but the view is much better at the top.

We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

Keep true to the dreams of your youth.

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

Within our dreams and aspirations we find our opportunities.

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

Wherever you go, go with all your heart.

It is virtually impossible to compete in today's global economy without a college degree.

It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.

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.

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.

Life is the most exciting opportunity we have. But we have one shot. You graduate from college once, and that's it. You're going out of that nest. And you have to find that courage that's deep, deep, deep in there. Every step of the way.

The knowledge of languages was very useful. I have a university degree in foreign languages and literature.

It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old, they grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.

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.

I think women as well as men are concerned about jobs and the economy and spending and, and other issues. They're concerned that when their kids graduate from college they have an economy and they have a future in this country and they, they have the same opportunity that we've had and our grandparents have had.

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.

I teach one semester a year, and this year I'm just teaching one course during that semester, a writing workshop for older students in their late 20s and early 30s, people in our graduate program who are already working on a manuscript and trying to bring it to completion.

Our record number of teenagers must become our record number of high school and college graduates and our record number of teachers, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and skilled professionals.

Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can - there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

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.

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.

I'm not impressed by someone's degree... I'm impressed by them making movies.

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.

I did graduate with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering in 1948.

After graduation, I wanted to work for 'Sassy', which I loved, but it had folded. So I wound up at 'Seventeen' for three years on staff and two as a contributor, and I wrote these great stories that nobody ever believes 'Seventeen' does. Serious stories for teens about social justice issues - gun control, migrant farm workers.

I have the cliche 'struggling actor' story. I was waiting tables in New York, went out to L.A. soon after graduation to get some jobs, but it didn't work out. I wanted to cut my teeth in professional theater, so I came back to New York. It made my journey a longer one, but I really wanted to excel in the theater.

In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.

When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.

I have a 4-year-old and a 14-year-old, and think I missed a recital and a graduation, and they were like 'It's OK mommy, we'll take pictures.' It was my upset, though... they were just fine! I just give them a kiss and a hug and let them know that I love them every day.

Whenever I hear, 'It can't be done,' I know I'm close to success.

I went to my son's graduation this weekend, and I heard a great quote I've never heard before from Albert Einstein. It was that the greatest danger to the world is not the bad people but it's the good people who don't speak out.

There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds.

Catholic school graduates exhibit a wide variety of qualities that will not only help them in their careers but also in their family and community lives.

It is soooooo necessary to get the basic skills, because by the time you graduate, undergraduate or graduate, that field would have totally changed from your first day of school.

I don't look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

Our promise to our children should be this: if you do well in school, we will pay for you to obtain a college degree.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each one of you is a fuse.

If a student takes the whole series of my folklore courses including the graduate seminars, he or she should learn something about fieldwork, something about bibliography, something about how to carry out library research, and something about how to publish that research.

In the summer we graduated we flipped out completely, drinking beer, cruising in our cars and beating up each other. It was a crazy summer. That's when I started to be interested in girls.

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.

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

My mother was keen that I complete my graduation and never ever wanted me to be in the movies, as my father had made five films that lost money. One of the films he made was 'Agneepath,' which was hugely hyped but underwhelming at the box office, and I remember that my dad had to sell my grandmother's flat to pay off the loan.

Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.

Mentors provide professional networks, outlets for frustration, college and career counseling, general life advice, and most importantly, an extra voice telling a student they are smart enough and capable enough to cross the stage at graduation and land their first paycheck from a career pathway job.

It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might has well not have lived at all, in which case you have failed by default.

My father was on the faculty in the Chemistry Department of Harvard University; my mother had one year of graduate work in physics before her marriage.

When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas.

You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You're on your own, and you know what you know. And you are the guy who'll decide where to go.

Just remember, you can't climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets.

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

Graduation speeches force you to reflect. They are about consciousness. Nothing is better than consciousness.

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.

I hope you will go out and let stories happen to you, and that you will work them, water them with your blood and tears and you laughter till they bloom, till you yourself burst into bloom.

Each year India and China produce four million graduates compared with just over 250,000 in Britain.

It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realized I'd become an actor.

I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.

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.

For students today, only 10 percent of children from working-class families graduate from college by the age of 24 as compared to 58 percent of upper-middle-class and wealthy families.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that's what I studied in college. That's what I always wanted to do.

I thought I should go to New York because it was the place to go to study. I went and tried to get an application from the Juilliard School but they wouldn't even give me one because I didn't have my high school graduation.

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.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

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

For many, graduation marks the end of formal student life - the end of long spring breaks and of thinking that a 10 A.M. class is far too early.

I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

I pretty much bailed on high school. I mean, I graduated, but I wasn't even there for my own graduation.

I have never been jealous. Not even when my dad finished fifth grade a year before I did.

The economy in the Valley will need to grow if students want to come back and work with their specialized degrees. We need to develop more to create more opportunities.

Even though I disagree with many of the changes, when I see the privates graduate at the end of the day, when they walk off that drill field at the end of the ceremony, they are still fine privates; outstanding, well motivated privates.

I received my undergraduate degree in engineering in 1939 and a Master of Science degree in mathematical physics in 1941 at Steven Institute of Technology.

In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate.

Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.

North Dakota State. What do you have to do there to graduate? Milk a cow with your left hand?

Even though I didn't get a business degree, I enjoyed learning about economics.

You can lead a man to Congress, but you can't make him think.

All my graduation money went to paying for bartending classes so I could have a side gig. I bartended for two months before I was supposed to move to New York and then two months later I got the job as an understudy in 'Sister Act' and haven't looked back since.

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

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.

I'm not retiring. I am graduating. Today is my graduation day. Retirement means that you'll just go ahead and live on your laurels and surf all day in Oceanside. It ain't going to happen.

So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.

I did my first film when I was in the final year of my graduation. At that time, I was still a kid, and I couldn't read the industry very well.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

At the end of four years' time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there's your numbers.

People with goals succeed because they know where they're going.

We don't stop going to school when we graduate.

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.

I did get a degree in special education.

I took three years off. I differentiated myself from the industry. Found my identity - sort of... I haven't graduated yet. I'm not legitimately educated yet, but maybe one day.