Graduation Quotations - Top 35


  1. "Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors! "
    Louisa May Alcott

  2. "Your schooling may be over, but remember that your education still continues."
    Anonymous

  3. "The purpose of a liberal education is to make you philosophical enough to accept the fact that you will never make much money."
    Anonymous

  4. "The young graduate is discovering that among the necessaries of life, the most important is living."
    Anonymous

  5. "There is no need to reach high for the stars. They are already within you - just reach deep into yourself!"
    Anonymous

  6. "Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these."
    Susan B. Anthony

  7. "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

  8. "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

  9. "People will frighten you about a graduation....They use words you don't hear often... 'And we wish you Godspeed.' It is a warning, Godpeed. It means you are no longer welcome here at these prices."
    Bill Cosby

  10. "A great many college graduates come here thinking of lawyers as social engineers arguing the great Constitutional issues."
    Archibald Cox

  11. "The function of the university is not simply to teach bread winning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization. "
    W.E.B. Du Bois

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

  13. "The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving."
    Russell Green

  14. "A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience. "
    A. Whitney Griswold

  15. "The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows."
    Sydney Harris

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

  17. "Great minds have purposes, others have wishes."
    Washington Irving

  18. "The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match, each one of you is a fuse."
    Ed Koch

  19. "The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate."
    Doug Larson

  20. "Don't ever dare to take your college as a matter of course~because, like democracy and freedom, many people you'll never know have broken their hearts to get it for you. "
    Alice Drue Miller

  21. "To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks."
    A. A. Milne

  22. "A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success."
    Robert Orben

  23. "Graduation is only a concept. In real life every day you graduate. Graduation is a process that goes on until the last day of your life. If you can grasp that , you'll make a difference."
    Arie Pencovici

  24. "The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future. "
    Plato

  25. "A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success."
    Robert Purvis

  26. "We know what we are, but know not what we may be."
    Shakespeare

  27. "Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not."
    George Bernard Shaw

  28. "A fellow told me he was going to hang-glider school. He said, 'I've been going for three months.' I said, 'How many successful jumps do you need to make before you graduate?' He said, 'All of them.'"
    Red Skeleton

  29. "At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry."
    Gloria Steinem

  30. "I have learned this at least by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dream, and endeavors to live the life which he had imagines, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. "
    Henry David Thoreau

  31. "Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined."
    Henry David Thoreau

  32. "'These are days you'll remember.' If you recall nothing else from your graduation ceremony, remember you heard the New Jersey Governor quote from 10,000 Maniacs."
    Christine Todd, NJ governor

  33. "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

  34. "A milestone passed, new things begun, dreams as shining as the sun, a goal achieved, a victory won! That's Graduation!"
    Unknown

  35. "It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days."
    Isabel Waxman

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