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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:

He sleeps by day
More than the wild-cat.

William Shakespeare

And to tired limbs and over-busy thoughts,
Inviting sleep and soft forgetfulness.

William Wordsworth The Excursion (1814)

Golden slumbers kiss your eyes,
Smiles awake you when you rise.

Thomas Dekker

Obedience is the mother of success, and success the parent of salvation.

Aeschylus

No weapon formed against you will have any success, and you will condemn any tongue that rises up against you in the judgment.

Isaiah

These poor mistaken people think they shine, and they do indeed, but it is as putrefaction shines, — in the dark.

Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield

One never rises so high as when one does not know where one is going.

Oliver Cromwell

Th' aspirer, once attain'd unto the top,
Cuts off those means by which himself got up.

Samuel Daniel

Sink not in spirit; who aimeth at the sky
Shoots higher much than he that means a tree.

George Herbert

It may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application resolve.

Edgar Allan Poe

Say, shall my little bark attendant sail,
Pursue the triumph, and partake the gale?

Alexander Pope

He that climbs the tall tree has won right to the fruit,
He that leaps the wide gulf should prevail in his suit.

Walter Scott

To climb steep hills
Requires slow pace at first.

William Shakespeare Henry VIII (1613)

But I like not these great successes of yours; for I know how jealous are the gods.

Herodotus trans. A. D. Godley, vol. 2, book 3, paragraph 40, p. 53, 55 (1928)

A liberal education is that which aims to develop faculty without ulterior views of profession or other means of gaining a livelihood. It considers man an end in himself and not an instrument whereby something is to be wrought. Its ideal is human perfection.

John Lancaster Spalding Aphorisms and Reflections (1901)

I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.

John F. Kennedy

If a king is energetic, his subjects will be equally energetic. If he is reckless, they will not only be reckless likewise, but also eat into his works. Besides, a reckless king will easily fall into the hands of his enemies. Hence the king shall ever be wakeful.

Chanakya

One of our immediate educational objectives must be the elimination of the competitive spirit, and the substitution of the co-operative consciousness. p. 74

Alice Bailey Education in the New Age (1954)

If there be an order in which the human race has mastered its various kinds of knowledge, there will arise in every child an aptitude to acquire these kinds of knowledge in the same order.

Herbert Spencer Education: Intellectual, Moral, and Physical (1861)

But this long run is a misleading guide to current affairs. In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task, if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us, that when the storm is long past, the ocean is flat again.

John Maynard Keynes A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923)

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