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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:

The learning process is something you can incite, literally incite, like a riot. And then, just possibly, hopefully, it goes home, or on.

Audre Lorde Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)

I have always observed that to succeed in the world one should appear like a fool but be wise.

Montesquieu

In your dream no one is a refugee.
Everyone has clean sheets.

Naomi Shihab Nye Voices in the Air: Poems for Listeners (2018)

What greater or better gift can we offer the republic than to teach and instruct our youth?

Cicero

The future is not what is coming at us, but what we are headed for.

Jean-Marie Guyau

We two [Deucalion and Pyrrha, after the deluge] form a multitude.

Ovid

No man was ever great without divine inspiration.

Cicero

The curse of greatness:
Ears ever open to the babbler's tale.

Friedrich Schiller

Tired Nature's sweet restorer, balmy sleep!
He, like the world, his ready visit pays
Where fortune smiles; the wretched he forsakes.

Edward Young

Thou sleepest, Brutus, and yet Rome is in chains.

Voltaire

Our awakening is touched with dismay; we must come to terms with this world or it will terminate us. When we speak of defending the environment, we are speaking of defending our own lives.

Frank Herbert

All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly — right now.

Buckminster Fuller Critical Path (1981)

To bring together the records of the past and to house them in buildings where they will be preserved for the use of men and women in the future, a Nation must believe in three things. It must believe in the past. It must believe in the future. It must, above all, believe in the capacity of its own people so to learn from the past that they can gain in judgment in creating their own future.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Children live on one side of despair, the awakened on the other side. p.83

Hermann Hesse Journey to the East (1932)

Life is a waste of wearisome hours
Which seldom the rose of enjoyment adorns;
And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers,
Is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

Thomas Moore Irish Melodies (1807)

O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Edgar Allan Poe A Dream Within A Dream (1849)

The value of dreams, like … divinations, is not that they give a specific answer, but that they open up new areas of psychic reality, shake us out of our customary ruts, and throw light on a new segment of our lives.

Rollo May The Courage to Create (1975)

Ah, the strange, sweet, lonely delight
Of the Valleys of Dream.

William Sharp

[E]ven a great man cannot be wise in everything.

Allen C. Guelzo The Bicentennial Lincolns (2010)

Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so.

Douglas Adams Last Chance to See (1990)

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