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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:

Sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow's eye,
Steal me awhile from mine own company.

William Shakespeare

And on their lids * * *
The baby Sleep is pillowed.

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab (1813)

When in the down I sink my head,
Sleep, Death's twin-brother, times my breath.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson In Memoriam A.H.H (1849)

Sleep, the fresh dew of languid love, the rain
Whose drops quench kisses till they burn again.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Peace courts his hand, but spreads her charms in vain;
"Think nothing gain'd," he cries, "till naught remain."

Samuel Johnson

The virtue lies
In the struggle, not the prize.

Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron Houghton

Ye gods, it doth amaze me,
A man of such a feeble temper should
So get the start of the majestic world,
And bear the palm alone.

William Shakespeare Julius Cæsar (1599)

There may come a day
Which crowns Desire with gift, and Art with truth,
And Love with bliss, and Life with wiser youth!

Bayard Taylor

"If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Thomas Paine

Two things make the future real, the artist's imagination and the worker's hope. Fascism destroys both. Therefore the artist and the worker must unite to destroy Fascism. The Fascist artist is a traitor, the neutral is already dead. Art and anti-Fascism are synonymous.

John Langdon-Davies

No matter how frequently you visit the realm of dreams, you will inevitably confront the unvarnished truth. However, our truth is so much bitter that not even the entirety of the world's sugar can sweeten it.

Sanu Sharma

Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It's been that way all this year. It's been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

Ernest Hemingway For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)

The Prophet said, "He who has a slave-girl and teaches her good manners and improves her education and then manumits and marries her, will get a double reward; and any slave who observes Allah's right and his master's right will get a double reward."

Muhammad

Better have failed in the high aim, as I,
Than vulgarly in the low aim succeed,—
As, God be thanked! I do not.

Robert Browning Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed (1919)

Those dreams that on the silent night intrude,
And with false flitting shapes our minds delude
… are mere productions of the brain.
And fools consult interpreters in vain.

Jonathan Swift On Dreams (1727)

You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe A Dream Within a Dream (1849)

Both dreams and myths are important communications from ourselves to ourselves. If we do not understand the language in which they are written, we miss a great deal of what we know and tell ourselves in those hours when we are not busy manipulating the outside world.

Erich Fromm

There are some men whom a staggering emotional shock, so far from making them mental invalids for life, seems, on the other hand, to awaken, to galvanize, to arouse into an almost incredible activity of soul.

William McFee

The thoroughly well-informed man—that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed man is a dreadful thing. It is like a bric-à-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.

Oscar Wilde

The success of most things depends upon knowing how long it will take to succeed.

Montesquieu

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