180 Graduation Quotes And Sayings
Graduating from school is an exciting time, and many people like to give advice and congratulate graduates with graduation quotes.
Use these famous senior quotes in a card to your son or daughter or use them in your commencement speech.
A significant time in many people’s lives, our famous graduation quotes will encourage you to move forward confidently as you celebrate and reflect on your accomplishments.
❤️🔥➡️Join me in my Complete Guide To Self-Esteem Course – I’ll hand you a self-esteem-boosting set of tips and abilities, actions, best practices and more.
Please also read our Self Reflection Quotes For And Epic Future and Quotes About Finding Yourself.
Graduation Quotes Celebrating Your Accomplishment
If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.
Nora Roberts
Your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinion drown your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition, they somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
Steve Jobs
The best way to predict your future is to create it.
Abraham Lincoln
Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
Gandhi
All our dreams can come true… if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney
We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.
JK Rowling | Graduation Quotes
How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and the strong. Because someday in life you will have been all of these.
George Washington Carver
Don’t make excuses, don’t blame the past. The rest of your life can be the best of your life!
Joel Osteen
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
Winston Churchill
Champions aren’t made in gyms. Champions are made from something they have deep inside them: a desire, a dream, a vision. They have to have the skill and the will. But the will must be stronger than the skill.
Muhammad Ali
So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable.
Christopher Reeve
Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.
Martin Luther King Jr.
You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once, but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.
Michelle Obama
It always seems impossible until it’s done.
Nelson Mandela
You are graduating, but don’t think school is over, the school of life is just beginning. Keep learning!
Catherine Pulsifer
Success doesn’t rush. The greatest reward is the journey!
Jeff Moore
There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.
C.S. Lewis
Give the ones you love wings to fly, roots to come back and reasons to stay.
Dalai Lama
Your life is your story, and the adventure ahead of you is the journey to fulfill your own purpose and potential.
Kerry Washington
Graduation is only a concept. In real life every day you graduate. Graduation is a process that goes on until the last day of your life. If you can grasp that, you’ll make a difference.
Arie Pencovici
Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.
Ella Fitzgerald
Live your life each day as you would climb a mountain. An occasional glance towards the summit keeps the goal in mind, but many beautiful scenes are to be observed from each new vintage point.
Harold B Melchart
Graduation Quotes
If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours.
Henry David Thoreau
Cherish your visions and your dreams as they are the children of your soul, the blueprints of your ultimate achievements.
Napoleon Hill
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
Don’t say you don’t have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Helen Keller, Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresea, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.
H. Jackson Brown Jr.
Successful and unsuccessful people do not vary greatly in their abilities. They vary in their desires to reach their potential.
John Maxwell
Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
Robert Louis Stevenson
Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do good.
Minor Myers Jr.
If I had only one message to impart that might help you be successful, it would be simply to start. To find your confidence, get out of your comfort zone, overcome your fears, and begin the journey to discover and accomplish what you want to do with your life.
Doretha Dingler
Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.
Les Brown
Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.
Albert Schweitzer
My favorite animal is the turtle. The reason is that in order for the turtle to move, it has to stick its neck out. There are going to be times in your life when you’re going to have to stick your neck out. There will be challenges and instead of hiding in a shell, you have to go out and meet them.
Ruth Westheimer
Graduation is not a single point along the continuum of life. Instead, graduation is a series of continuing steps where additional education and life experiences culminate in a life driven by a self-sacrificing desire to contribute to the well-being of those people who are around you.
Byron Pulsifer | Inspiring Graduation Quotes
Never doubt you were born to do great things!
Catherine Pulsifer
Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.
Will Rogers
The highest result of education is tolerance.
Helen Keller
Graduation is not the end; it’s the beginning.
Senator Orrin Hatch
There is nothing a person can’t do, and there should be nothing a human being didn’t care about. It was the most positive encouragement I could have hoped for.
Maya Angelou | Famous Graduation Quotes
It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.
Jerry Zucker
Nobody ever wrote down a plan to be broke, fat, lazy, or stupid. Those things are what happen when you don’t have a plan.
Larry Winget
Man often becomes what he believes himself to be. If I keep on saying to myself that I cannot do a certain thing, it is possible that I may end by really becoming incapable of doing it. On the contrary, if I have the belief that I can do it, I shall surely acquire the capacity to do it even if I may not have it at the beginning.
Mahatma Gandhi
Graduation Sayings
You can complain about the direction of your life all you want, but until you sit in the driver’s seat and begin to drive yourself, you aren’t going to get where you want to go!
Les Brown
You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world’s problems at once, but don’t ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious, and hope can take on a life of its own.
Michelle Obama
Success is no accident. It is hard work, perseverance, learning, studying, sacrifice, and most of all, love of what you are doing.
Pelé
Your parents, proudly here today, and their parents before them, perhaps proudly here today, understood a simple equation for success: your children would do better than you had.
Anna Quindlen
There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.
Unknown
Without a doubt, the best graduation speeches captivate the audience, heart and soul. They enchant us without smothering. They advise us without being didactic.
Randy Howe
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
Henry David Thoreau
Not only can you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it when you’re having it.
Dick Costolo
Kid, you’ll move mountains. Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting so get on your way!
Dr. Seuss
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life.
Omar Khayyam
List your strengths and don’t be shy. Celebrate the things you do well. Trust your decisions. Take action
Erica Hudson
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
If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
Milton Berle
Success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it… Err in the direction of kindness.
George Saunders
Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life.
Frederick W. Robertson
Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
As you start your journey, the first thing you should do is throw away that store-bought map and begin to draw your own.”
Michael Dell
Don’t just get involved. Fight for your seat at the table. Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.
Barack Obama
This is your time and it feels normal to you but really there is no normal. There’s only change, and resistance to it and then more change.
Meryl Streep
When you leave here, don’t forget why you came.
Adlai E. Stevenson
Ditch the dream and be a doer, not a dreamer, whether or not you know what your ‘passion’ might be. The truth is, it doesn’t matter. You don’t have to know. You just have to keep moving forward. You just have to keep doing something, seizing the next opportunity, staying open to trying something new.
Shonda Rhimes
Famous Graduation Quotes
My wish for you is that this life becomes all that you want it to. Your dreams stay big, your worries stay small and that you never need to carry more than you can hold.
Rascal Flatts
Showing up is 80 percent of life.
Woody Allen
The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
Vidal Sassoon
A successful man is one who can lay a firm foundation with the bricks others have thrown at him.
David Brinkley
Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears.
Les Brown
I wasn’t under any delusion that a single message would change their world, but I was determined to prepare something that would contribute to their lives beyond graduation day, something that would help them to choose a life that matters.
Dennis Rainey
Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Norman Vincent Peale
Every person you meet knows something you don’t; learn from them.
H Jackson Brown Jr.
The world rewards those who take responsibility for their own success.
Curt Gerrish
Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first.
Anna Quindlen
And they also deserve from us gratitude for undertaking the rigorous education which they have, for pushing themselves to the limits and now for going into the world ready to use their talents .
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun.
Joss Whedon
The unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.
Jon Stewart
Today is a milestone. It tells you how far you’ve come. Keep learning, keep trying, keep accomplishing, and keep venturing on through your journey. Congratulations!
Unknown
Graduation is the same thing as taking that first baby step as a child. It is only the beginning, not the end. Thus, take the advent of graduation as that first step where life’s difficulties or failures only spark new attempts with the full understanding that nobody can discourage your progress except you.
Byron R. Pulsifer | Graduation Quotes
The whole secret of a successful life is to find out what is one’s destiny to do, and then do it.
Henry Ford
Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.
Helen Keller
I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.
Thomas Jefferson
Things work out best for those who make the best of how things work out.
John Wooden
As we look ahead into the next century, leaders will be those who empower others.
Bill Gates
I didn’t get there by wishing for it or hoping for it, but by working for it.
Estée Lauder
Believe you can and you’re halfway there.
Theodore Roosevelt
Never give up, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn.
Harriet Beecher Stow
Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The first of many graduations in life. From elementary school to senior school, each one holds successes for you to enjoy.
Catherine Pulsifer
Inspiring Graduation Quotes
The only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you.
Tom Bradley
The first step toward success is taken when you refuse to be a captive of the environment in which you first find yourself.
Mark Caine
Each one of us has the ability to lead a dynamic life by pursuing our unique goals and dreams. There are no limits to what you can accomplish when you know who you are and have faith in what you can do.
Stedman Graham
Believe in your greatness. Because what you believe is what you become.
Udai Yadla
I don’t focus on what I’m up against. I focus on my goals and I try to ignore the rest.
Venus Williams | Inspirational Graduation Quotes
Don’t make excuses, don’t blame the past. The rest of your life can be the best of your life!
Joel Osteen
When you find yourself in the thickness of pursuing a goal or dream, stop only to rest. Momentum builds success.
Suzy Kassem
Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.
Michael Jordan
You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.
Dr. Seuss
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X
You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
David Foster Wallace
Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.
William Arthur Ward
When you take risks, you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.
Ellen DeGeneres
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower.
Steve Jobs
Life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it.
Charles R. Swindoll
Believe in yourself! Have faith in your abilities! Without a humble but reasonable confidence in your own powers you cannot be successful or happy.
Norman Vincent Peale
Tough times don’t last. Tough people do.
Robert H. Schuller
Having the right mindset is critical to graduation no matter at what age you decide to take the leap. The mindset? You must acquire the right mindset that places you in the right frame of mind to make the right decisions, which will lead to the right habits, eventually leading you down the right path as you grow beyond where you are right now.
Mike Finley
Graduate Quotes That Are Inspirational
We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey.
Kenji Miyazawa
The key to life is accepting challenges. Once someone stops doing this, he’s dead.
Bette Davis
Your generation has inherited circumstances that point to a highly uncertain future. Recent economic turmoil, geopolitical shocks, and social shifts indicate you will face many difficult challenges in the years ahead. “But in every crisis lies opportunity. So as you graduate today, I have one simple message: be really, really good at hockey.
Wayne Gretzky , Commencement Address, University of Alberta
We aim above the mark to hit the mark.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
If you want to achieve excellence, you can get there today. As of this second, quit doing less than excellent work.
Thomas J. Watson
You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Life is a teacher. We are the student.
Lailah Gifty Akita
Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know it when you find it.
Steve Jobs
Share your sparkle wherever you are.
Dodinsky
Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world right in the eye.
Helen Keller
Not only can you not plan the impact you’re going to have, you often won’t recognize it when you’re having it.
Dick Costolo
After years of daily effort and sleepless nights cramming for exams and finishing term papers, the day finally comes when you put on your caps and gowns to stand in line to receive the university diploma certifying that the time has come for you to make your entry into the real world.
Maria C. Siccardi
Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.
Carol Burnett
Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone.
Pablo Picasso
I believe that the only courage anybody ever needs is the courage to follow your own dreams.
Oprah Winfrey
Courage is one step ahead of fear.
Coleman Young
Be patient with yourself. Self-growth is tender; it’s holy ground. There’s no greater investment.
Stephen Covey
Graduation, a conclusion of one chapter, a beginning of another.
Catherine Pulsifer
No matter where you’re from, your dreams are valid.
Lupita Nyong’o
Once in a while it really hits people that they don’t have to experience the world in the way they have been told.
Alan Keightley
Inspirational Quotes For Graduates
Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive: easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.
Henry Peter Brougham
Sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do.
Oprah Winfrey
If you choose to walk in love and keep a positive, faith-filled focus, your trials will actually graduate you to a higher level of operative grace-life following that season.
Patricia King
You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.
Jim Carrey
Moment by moment you are building the story of your life. You control your thoughts and acts as an author of a novel controls the thoughts and actions of the characters in his story. No matter what happens to you in the pages of time, you have the power to react like a hero!
Wilfred Peterson
A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world.
Sheryl Sandberg
Only I can change my life. No one can do it for me.
Carol Burnett
The man realized that what counted was not where a person lived, but how a person lived.
Spencer Johnson
Graduation isn’t the end of a tough journey. It is the beginning of a beautiful one…
Unknown
If you don’t value your time, neither will others. Stop giving away your time and talents–start charging for it.
Kim Garst
Try not to become a man of success. Rather become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
What is not started today is never finished tomorrow.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Don’t watch the clock; do what it does. Keep going.
Sam Levenson
After graduating, the possibilities are infinite, but they are a lot harder to obtain and you don’t always end up where you thought you would be. That’s also what is so exciting.
Jenny Blake
Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.
Jim Ryun
You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it.
Margaret Thatcher
There will be obstacles. There will be doubters. There will be mistakes. But with hard work, there are no limits.
Michael Phelps
You will never find time for anything. You must make it.
Charles Buxton
What lies behind us, and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Quotes To Inspire You On Graduation
So the history we share should give you hope. And the future we share should give you hope. You’re graduating into a job market that’s improving. You live in a time when advances in technology and communications puts the world at your fingertips. Your generation is uniquely poised for success unlike any before it.
President Barack Obama, Commencement Speech 2013
Take pride in how far you’ve come. Have faith in how far you can go. But don’t forget to enjoy the journey.
Michael Josephson
Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.
Albert Einstein
Good, better, best. Never let it rest. ‘Til your good is better and your better is best.
St. Jerome
Do not wait; the time will never be ‘just right.’ Start where you stand, and work with whatever tools you may have at your command, and better tools will be found as you go along.
George Herbert
The starting point of all achievement is desire.
Napoleon Hill
Don’t allow yourself to become one who, nearing death, regrets what you might have done if only you had taken a few risks We each have a purpose in life.
Gillian Stokes
Everything you’ve ever wanted is on the other side of fear.
George Addair
I’d rather regret the things I’ve done than regret the things I haven’t done.
Lucille Ball
Why should you continue going after your dreams? Because seeing the look on the faces of the people who said you couldn’t… will be priceless.
Kevin Ngo
Never before, since the beginning of time, has there ever been anybody exactly like you; and never again throughout all the ages to come will there ever be anybody exactly like you again.
Dale Carnegie
Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.
Arthur Ashe
I have lots of things to prove to myself. One is that I can live my life fearlessly.
Oprah Winfrey | Motivational Graduation Quotes
There are no regrets in life. Just lessons.
Jennifer Aniston
Be bold, be courageous, be your best.
Gabrielle Giffords
It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
E.E. Cummings
Life is an improvisation. You have no ideas what’s going to happen next and you are mostly making things up as you go along.
Stephen Colbert
If you are not willing to risk the usual you will have to settle for the ordinary.
Jim Rohn
Just when the caterpillar thought the world was ending, he turned into a butterfly.
Proverb
Motivational Graduation Quotes
Always be the first-rate version of yourself, instead of the second-rate version of somebody else.
Judy Garland
Now you have graduated and “commenced,” ending the last segment of your previous adventure, and now you begin your next adventure.
Tom Swanson
Develop success from failures. Discouragement and failure are two of the surest stepping stones to success.
Dale Carnegie
It’s always a good move to listen to that inner voice…if it doesn’t lead to a crime.
Lisa Kudrow
What is considered impossible is someone else’s opinion. What is possible is my decision.
Idowu Koyenikan
To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
Anatole France
Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.
Og Mandino
Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination; never limit others because of your own limited imagination.
Mae Jemison
Knowledge is not power. The implementation of knowledge is power.
Larry Winget
As a lot of us have found out, graduation only means that you are ready to keep learning, to keep your skills advanced and growing because you never know when you will find yourself out on the street.
Byron Pulsifer | Amazing Graduation Quotes
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
If you want to achieve greatness stop asking for permission.
Anonymous
I find that when you have a real interest in life and a curious life, that sleep is not the most important thing.
Martha Stewart
Nothing is really work unless you would rather be doing something else.
J.M. Barrie
Life is a journey, and if you fall in love with the journey, you will be in love forever.
Peter Hagerty
Graduates, today your formal education begins! Here’s your first lesson. Find a wise mentor.
Rick Rigsby
The important thing is not to stop questioning.
Albert Einstein
Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.
Malcolm X | Graduation Quotes For Tomorrow
Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
Confucius
Before you set off on the great adventure of life, you have to decide where you want to end up. The good news is there have never been more opportunities to achieve your goals than there are today.
Brian Tracy
Opportunities don’t happen, you create them.
Chris Grosser
Don’t let the fear of losing be greater than the excitement of winning.
Robert Kiyosaki
Congratulations to all the special people who graduated this year! I wish you success in your many endeavors throughout your life.