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Graduation Quotes

Two of the most popular graduation lines are flagged. “Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself” is a paraphrase of John Dewey, not a quotation. The one about education being what remains after you have forgotten what you learned in school is credited to Einstein and flagged as misattributed.

The page is assembled from the pages on education, success, the future, dreams and learning. It has no graduation speeches in it, but it does have a lot of quotes that get used in them. If you are writing a speech, use the sourced entries; the label will tell you which is which.

Random quote on Graduation

Most quoted on graduation:

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future.

Winston Churchill The Second World War (1939)

There is only one thing that can kill the Movies, and that is education.

Will Rogers The Autobiography of Will Rogers (1949)

Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning.

Antoine de Saint-Exupéry Terre des Hommes (1939)

Why does the eye see a thing more clearly in dreams than with the imagination being awake?

Leonardo da Vinci The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883)

The educated don't get that way by memorizing facts; they get that way by respecting them.

Tom Heehler The Well-Spoken Thesaurus (2011)

Still enveloped in a blanket of dreams
my life continued to lie still, pretending as if
it was in a deep slumber.

Suman Pokhrel

Some day Love shall claim his own,
Some day Right ascend his throne,
Some day hidden Truth be known;
Some day—some sweet day.

Lewis J. Bates

Man's unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite.

Thomas Carlyle Sartor Resartus (1833)

If I were to awaken after having slept for a thousand years, my first question would be: Has the Riemann hypothesis been proven?

David Hilbert Mathematical Mysteries : The Beauty and Magic of Numbers (1999)

We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.

Max Planck The Universe in the Light of Modern Physics (1931)

The future's uncertain and the end is always near

Jim Morrison

No really great man ever thought himself so.

William Hazlitt The Plain Speaker (1826)

I've seen the future, brother:
it is murder.

Leonard Cohen The Future (1992)

Future generations are unlikely to condone our lack of prudent concern for the integrity of the natural world that supports all life.

Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)

I dreamt that I dwelt in marble halls,
With vassals and serfs at my side.

Alfred Bunn

Across the silent stream
Where the dream-shadows go,
From the dim blue Hill of Dream
I have heard the west wind blow.

William Sharp

A great man, I take it, is a man so inspired and permeated with the ideas of God and the Christly spirit as to be too magnanimous for vengeance, and too unselfish to seek his own ends.

David Thomas Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

May there be no unfulfilled dreams like this
may there be realities that satisfy me.

Sanu Sharma

In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.

Henry Rollins

How does this man have such a knowledge of the Scriptures when he has not studied at the schools?

John the Evangelist

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