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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:

I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night; and then the nap takes me.

Samuel Johnson

If education is always to be conceived along the same antiquated lines of a mere transmission of knowledge, there is little to be hoped from it in the bettering of man's future.

Maria Montessori The Absorbent Mind (1949)

Few men make themselves masters of the things they write or speak.

John Selden Table Talk (1689)

There was never a nation great until it came to the knowledge that it had nowhere in the world to go for help.

Charles Dudley Warner Studies in the South and West with Comments on Canada (1889)

A dream is a creation of the intelligence, the creator being present but not knowing how it will end.

Cesare Pavese This Business of Living (1935)

When the shore is won at last,
Who will count the billows past?

John Keble The Christian Year (1827)

It is, in a great measure, by raising up and endowing great minds that God secures the advance of human affairs, and the accomplishment of His own plans on earth.

Albert Barnes Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895)

The Great Western Disease is that we fixate on the future at the expense of enjoying the life we're living now.

Marshall Goldsmith

School helps young people if it manages to teach them critical thinking.

Evandro Agazzi

It is always in season for old men to learn.

Aeschylus

Failure makes success so much sweeter, and allows you to thumb your nose at the crowds.

Wilbur Smith

Great men stand like solitary towers in the city of God.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Kavanagh: A Tale (1849)

The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart.

Mencius

Success always demands a greater effort.

Winston Churchill

To do for the world more than the world does for you, that is Success.

Henry Ford

The dream is the small hidden door in the deepest and most intimate sanctum of the soul, which opens to that primeval cosmic night that was soul long before there was conscious ego and will be soul far beyond what a conscious ego could ever reach.

Carl Jung The Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man (1934)

I owe my success to the fact that I never had a clock in my workroom. Seventy-five of us worked twenty hours every day and slept only four hours — and thrived on it.

Thomas Edison

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past.

Patrick Henry Speech in the Second Virginia Convention (1775)

If there is to be any permanent improvement in man and any better social order, it must come mainly from the education and humanizing of man.

Clarence Darrow Crime : Its Cause And Treatment (1922)

People must have both their dreams and their dinners in this world, and when we go out of it we must take what we find. That is all.

James Branch Cabell The Silver Stallion (1926)

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