A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
Henry Ford
A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that 'individuality' is the key to success.
Robert Orben
A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education, he may steal the whole railroad.
Theodore Roosevelt
A professor is someone who talks in someone else's sleep.
W.H. Auden
A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
Francis Bacon
Essays, 1625
Academe, n.: An ancient school where morality and philosophy were taught. Academy, n.: A modern school where football is taught.
Ambrose Bierce
The Devil's Dictionary
All our dreams can come true...if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney
All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.
Brian Tracy
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
Judy Garland
At commencement you wear your square-shaped mortarboards. My hope is that from time to time you will let your minds be bold, and wear sombreros.
Paul Freund
Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind.
Dr. Seuss
Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.
Garry Trudeau
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Don't be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can't cross a chasm in two small jumps.
David Lloyd George
Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Don't live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.
Wendy Wasserstein
Don't waste time learning the "tricks of the trade." Instead, learn the trade.
Attributed to both James Charlton and H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz. I breezed through the questions until I read the last one: "What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?"Surely this was a joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade. "Absolutely," the professor said. "In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello. "I've never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy.
Joann C. Jones
Education is a companion which no misfortune can depress, no crime can destroy, no enemy can alienate, no despotism can enslave. At home, a friend, abroad, an introduction, in solitude a solace and in society an ornament. It chastens vice, it guides virtue, it gives at once grace and government to genius. Without it, what is man? A splendid slave, a reasoning savage.
Joseph Addison
Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
Oscar Wilde
The Critic as Artist, 1890
Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.
William Butler Yeats
Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
Nelson Mandela
Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.
B.F. Skinner
Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.
Ralph Marston
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed.
Erma Bombeck
Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
Pearl S. Buck
Hitch your wagon to a star.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.
Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel
I hope that my achievements in life shall be these - that I will have fought for what was right and fair, that I will have risked for that which mattered, and that I will have given help to those who were in need that I will have left the earth a better place for what I've done and who I've been.
C. Hoppe
If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door.
Milton Berle
If you aren't fired with enthusiasm, you will be fired with enthusiasm.
Vince Lombardi
If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.
William Arthur Ward
If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.
Robert Goheen
Time Magazine, 23 June 1961
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance!
Andy McIntyre
In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
Harold Geneen
It is clear the future holds great opportunities. It also holds pitfalls. The trick will be to avoid the pitfalls, seize the opportunities, and get back home by six o'clock.
Woody Allen
"My Speech to the Graduates", Side Effects
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
Edmund Hillary
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Aristotle
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
e.e. cummings
It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge.
Brooks Atkinson
Once Around the Sun
Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars.
Richard Halliburton
Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
Roger Babson
Life is my college. May I graduate well, and earn some honors!
Louisa May Alcott
Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
My father always told me, "Find a job you love and you'll never have to work a day in your life."
Jim Fox
Nothing happens unless first a dream.
Carl Sandburg
Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
Henry Ford
Of course there's a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don't take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.
A. Lawrence Lowell
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.
Marianne Williamson
A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of "A Course in Miracles," 1992 (commonly misattributed to Nelson Mandela, 1994 inauguration speech)
Our progress as a nation can be no swifter than our progress in education. The human mind is our fundamental resource.
Jack Kennedy
Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.
Les Brown
Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.
Susan B. Anthony
Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
Winston Churchill
Success isn't a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
Arnold H. Glasow
The advantage of a classical education is that it enables you to despise the wealth that it prevents you from achieving.
Russell Green
The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm.
Fred Dehner
The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match, each one of you is a fuse.
Ed Koch
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
Eleanor Roosevelt
The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change.
Maya Angelou
The human spirit needs to accomplish, to achieve, to triumph to be happy.
Ben Stein
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder.
Ralph W. Sockman
The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
Henry Ford
The one real object of education is to have a man in the condition of continually asking questions.
Bishop Mandell Creighton
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
Aristotle
The true meaning of life is to plant trees, under whose shade you do not expect to sit.
Nelson Henderson
The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.
Sydney J. Harris
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
Beverly Sills
There is a good reason they call these ceremonies "commencement exercises." Graduation is not the end; it's the beginning.
Orrin Hatch
There is a great deal of difference between an eager man who wants to read a book and the tired man who wants a book to read.
G.K. Chesterton
There is just one life for each of us: our own.
Euripides
Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out.
Art Linkletter
Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures.
H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
Life's Little Instruction Book
Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves.
Jawaharlal Nehru
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France
To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.
e.e. cummings
1955
To the uneducated, an A is just three sticks.
A.A. Milne
Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
Try not. Do or do not. There is no try.
Yoda
In movie The Empire Strikes Back
What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
What we are is God's gift to us. What we become is our gift to God.
Eleanor Powell
When you leave here, don't forget why you came.
Adlai Stevenson
To college graduates
Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.
William Lyon Phelps
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius
Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine.
Anthony J. D'Angelo
The College Blue Book
Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn't always have to be their top priority.
William Arthur Ward
You are educated. Your certification is in your degree. You may think of it as the ticket to the good life. Let me ask you to think of an alternative. Think of it as your ticket to change the world.
Tom Brokaw
You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
John Updike
You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.
John Wooden
You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
You are the guy who'll decide where to go.
Dr. Seuss
Your families are extremely proud of you. You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money.
Gary Bolding
