Skip to content

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:

It is the quality and intensity of the dream only which raises men above the biological norm; and it is fidelity to the dream which differentiates the exceptional figure, the man of heroic stature, from the muddling, aimless mediocrities about him.

Burton Rascoe Introduction to Chivalry (1921)

I hear a voice you cannot hear,
Which says I must not stay;
I see a hand you cannot see,
Which beckons me away.

Thomas Tickell

Scattered in the wind
Earthboy calls me from my dreams:
Dirt is where the dreams must end.

James Welch

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist (1891)

Deign on the passing world to turn thine eyes,
And pause a while from learning to be wise.
There mark what ills the scholar's life assail —
Toil, envy, want, the patron, and the jail.

Samuel Johnson The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749)

Rien ne réussit comme le succès.

Alexandre Dumas

Father in heaven, when the thought of thee awakens in our soul, let it not waken as an agitated bird which flutters confusedly about, but as a child waking from sleep with a celestial smile.

Søren Kierkegaard

Again let us dream where the land lies sunny,
And live, like the bees, on our hearts' old honey,
Away from the world that slaves for money—
Come, journey the way with me.

Madison Cawein New Poems (1909)

Sleep, baby, sleep!
Thy father's watching the sheep.
Thy mother's shaking the dreamland tree,
And down drops a little dream for thee.
Sleep, baby, sleep!

Elizabeth Prentiss

I felt I was getting enraged
and losing my speech
like them losing their dreams.

Suman Pokhrel

When the Sleepy Man comes with the dust on his eyes
(Oh, weary, my Dearie, so weary!)
He shuts up the earth, and he opens the skies.
(So hush-a-by, weary my Dearie!)

Charles G. D. Roberts

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.

Ernest Dowson

The dream
Dreamed by a happy man, when the dark East,
Unseen, is brightening to his bridal morn.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Like glimpses of forgotten dreams.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

The mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be kindled.

Plutarch

Lawrence Bragg, a shrewd observer of the birth of quantum mechanics, summed up the situation in a few words: "Everything in the future is a wave — everything in the past is a particle."

Freeman Dyson

We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.

John F. Kennedy

So often do the spirits
Of great events stride on before the events,
And in to-day already walks to-morrow.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In adamantine chains shall Death be bound,
And Hell's grim tyrant feel th' eternal wound.

Alexander Pope

We need to learn from the most politically bold and creative among us. (We also need to offer concrete solidarity and support to those we learn from, lest learning from mean ripping off.)

Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz

Related topics