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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:

Jean, Jean, you're young and alive
Come out of your half-dreamed dream
And run, if you will, to the top of the hill
Open your arms, bonnie Jean.

Rod McKuen Music to The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968)

People who know moral education know that we lost a lot by not educating our children morally.

Josephine Okwuekeleke Tolefe

As a director, you have the job of dreaming up the movie, and then you have to get everyone else in the movie – hundreds of people – to have that same dream, too.

Greta Gerwig

Life has a good future, especially when the CO2 tax comes...

Anna Heringer Gespräch mit den Lehmbauexperten (2017)

When a society has doubts about its future, it tends to produce spokesmen whose main appeal is to the emotions, who argue from intuitions, and whose claim to be truth-bearers rests solely on intense personal feeling.

Kenneth Tynan Tynan Right and Left (1967)

Riding is an exercise of the mind. I dreamed a good deal on the back of my horse, going out into the hills alone.

N. Scott Momaday In the Presence of the Sun (1992)

To achieve a goal, you have to believe in it, sometimes irrationally. This increases the chances of success.

Gianroberto Casaleggio

Let thy young wanderer dream on:
Call him not home.
A door opens, a breath a voice
From the ancient room,
Speaks to him now. Be it dark or bright
He is knit with his doom.

George William Russell

I am the Eschaton. I am not your God.
I am descended from you, and exist in your future.
Thou shalt not violate causality within my historic light cone. Or else.

Charles Stross Singularity Sky (2003)

I walked beside the evening sea
And dreamed a dream that could not be;
The waves that plunged along the shore
Said only: "Dreamer, dream no more!"

George William Curtis

In our proposed budget, we spend more money on education than ever before.

Larry Hogan State of the State Address: A New Direction for Maryland (2015)

The future is the place of all potential monsters.

Jordan Peterson

100 painters engraving their dreams
on skin

Raquel Jodorowsky

School should teach us how to be alone, to live our passions, to put emotions at the center of our lives.

Paolo Crepet

When I graduated from high school, I hoped that one day gay Americans would be able to get married. And now here I am 45 years later officiating same-sex marriages—how can I not be optimistic that the future is bright?

Daayiee Abdullah

I shall tell you just a few odd facts which might interest you. The educational system in Russia is supposed by many competent judges to be the best and most up-to-date in existence.

Jawaharlal Nehru Glimpses of World History (1934)

Often he was a joy, and you know, he was one of the few people I ever learned anything from.

Werner Herzog Herzog on Herzog (2002)

When learning is in focus, arrangements are made in the environment of the learner that communicate the learning task, and learning resources are made available to learners so that they can explore and master learning tasks.

Béla H. Bánáthy Systems Design of Education (1991)

I've lost myself in my work many times. If you love what you do, this can be a Zen thing, where past and future recede to a vanishing point and leave nothing but the perfect vexing, challenging, beguiling now.

John Vorhaus The Albuquerque Turkey (2011)

The Red Guards and other revolutionary organizations of the young people in the colleges and middle schools are the shook force fighting in the van in the great cultural revolution, and a powerful reserve force of the People’s Liberation Army.

Lin Biao

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