Quotes About Graduation

#1. Upon graduation, believe it or not, I had no job. I had no interviews. I had no prospects. I had no worries. What I did have, I had passion. I had enormous passion. I had passion for financial markets. I had fallen in love with financial markets.

Gary Cohn

#2. Everybody got to write you - but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen.

Benjamin Alire Saenz

#3. When I was in college, my graduation thesis was called 'Female Directors.' I interviewed all of the important female directors from Mexico. There were four. That was it.

Patricia Riggen

#4. When I finished high school, I wanted to take all my graduation money and buy myself a motorcycle. But my mom said no. See, she had a brother who died in a horrible motorcycle accident when he was 18. And I could just have his motorcycle.

Anthony Jeselnik

#5. There are times when we do not recognize that it is time for us to move forward. When life is ready for us to move and we resist, life will move us by any means necessary. What may feel like a disaster is actually a graduation. Remain open to being guided, supported and protected by the universe.

Iyanla Vanzant

#6. Death is a graduation. When we're taught all the things we came to teach, learned all the things we came to learn, then we're allowed to graduate.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#7. You might be a redneck if you missed 5th grade graduation because you had jury duty.

Jeff Foxworthy

#8. Upon graduation from high school, following my brother by a couple of years, I joined the U.S. Air Force.

Dennis L. McKiernan

#9. After graduation, we can just ... ride into the sunrise," he says. "The sunrise?" His lips twitch. "If we ride into the sunset, we'd wind up in the middle of the Pacific.

Heather Demetrios

#10. I was a lesbian for a semester at Wesleyan - it was a graduation requirement.

Ayelet Waldman

#11. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying says that death is the graduation ceremony, while living is just a long course in learning and preparing for the next journey. If we acknowledge death as the beginning, then how can we fear it?

Nikki Sixx

#12. Throw in the intensity of emotions that come with that bittersweet summer sandwiched between high school graduation and the rest of your life ...

Emily Giffin

#13. He was some sort of boxing champion," she told me the night she took me out to celebrate my graduation. "He was always punching someone in the nose."
"Macho," I said.
"No," she said. "It was the clarity of expression that appealed to him.

Melissa Bank

#14. I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

#15. There are people who have figured out the exact, you know, Kanye West formula, the mix between "Graduation" and "808s," and were able to become more successful at it.

Kanye West

#16. I love graduation speeches. I have always loved them; I will always love them.

Bruce Eric Kaplan

#17. I attended an evangelical Christian university on the outskirts of suburban Los Angeles and by the time of my graduation was neither evangelical nor Christian.

Mallory Ortberg

#18. I left for New York three days after graduation.

Jenn Lyon

#19. The years after graduation hardened me into someone quite different from the strutting graduate who left campus that day headed for New York city, ready to offer the world his talent. The world, I discovered. was not all that interested.

Mitch Albom

#20. People will frighten you about a graduation ... They use words you don't hear often ...

Bill Cosby

#21. When I started singing as a freshman, I didn't sing for anybody - my parents or my friends. By the time I was a senior, the teacher asked me if I wanted to audition for a solo at my graduation. I was really nervous but I got it.

Toby Lightman

#22. I fell in love with theater there, and after graduation I moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting.

Olivia Wilde

#23. I see myself being a great-grandmother at my great-grandson's graduation from a school that has my name on it.

Jill Scott

#24. Maybe it's a symptom of a small town - and Gentry certainly was that - but for some, even after graduation, high school never really ends.

Matt Abrams

#25. A month before graduation I got an off-Broadway job. Then I did some commercials, including one for MCI. You can only see half of me, but it paid well. Thank God for commercials.

Lee Pace

#26. We believed we could prepare our kids for a more competitive world. And today, our younger students have earned the highest math and reading scores on record. Our high school graduation rate has hit an all-time high. And more Americans finish college than ever before.

Barack Obama

#27. Everyone at Coral Tree Prep was good-looking. Really. Everyone. I didn't see a single fat or ugly kid all morning. Maybe they just locked them up at registration and didn't let them out again until graduation.

Claire LaZebnik

#28. At my graduation, I thought we had to marry what we wished to become. Now you are becoming the men you once would have wished to marry.

Gloria Steinem

#29. Hymns should have unity,graduation and mutual dependence in the thoughts,a conscious progress,a sense of completeness..and be easily understood.

James Montgomery

#30. Popular as he was as a graduation speaker, Vonnegut never graduated from college.

Kurt Vonnegut

#31. In the school of the woods, there is no graduation day.

Horace Kephart

#32. The stunning part was that one time Neil McElroy the Secretary of Defense who was the father of one of our classmates spoke and basically at commencement, he told us all that our job after graduation was to get married and have interesting sons ... and we all found that hard to believe.

Madeleine Albright

#33. In Gadsden County, Florida, for example, students were required to take a total of 242 standardized exams between kindergarten and their high school graduation day, according to a recent study by the conservative Foundation for Excellence in Education.

Anonymous

#34. Texas is a national leader in education reform and student achievement. Through our college- and career-ready standards and assessments, strong school accountability, and a focus on educator development, we have created an education system that prepares our students for success after graduation.

Rick Perry

#35. We have the highest graduation rates, the broadest health care access, and the greatest level of home ownership and workforce participation in the country. And we did it all with a small population in a cold state that coastal big shots refer to as fly-over land.

Tim Pawlenty

#36. A few months after graduation I was working in films. It took off pretty quick.

Moira Kelly

#37. I thought I should go to New York because it was the place to go to study. I went and tried to get an application from the Juilliard School but they wouldn't even give me one because I didn't have my high school graduation.

Maureen Forrester

#38. I commuted to the prestigious Hibiya High School from my uncle's home in Tokyo. During the high school years, I developed an interest in chemistry, so upon graduation, I chose to take an entrance examination for the Department of Chemistry of the University of Kyoto, the old capital of Japan.

Susumu Tonegawa

#39. Live your fear." Why didn't we teach kids that? Why wasn't that in a graduation speech? Commencement speakers should start telling the truth: "You're going to fuck up, but most of the time, that's all right.

Mara Wilson

#40. We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

H.G.Wells

#41. I'm not retiring. I am graduating. Today is my graduation day. Retirement means that you'll just go ahead and live on your laurels and surf all day in Oceanside. It ain't going to happen.

Junior Seau

#42. Following graduation from high school in 1948, I attended Harvard University where I became a physics major. Having grown up in a small town, I found Harvard to be an enormously enriching experience. Students in my class came from all walks of life and from a great variety of geographical locations.

David Lee

#43. The first time I saw him again, it was another year, at my college graduation. And I just knew.

Jenny Han

#44. After graduation in June of 1984, I moved to Manhattan. My first stop was a psychiatrist, who in less than our first fifty-minute session again diagnosed me with depression.

Andy Behrman

#45. Boredom is the specter that haunts children from kindergarten to graduation on every continent.

Amanda Ripley

#46. There is a good reason they call these ceremonies 'commencement exercises'. Graduation is not the end; it's the beginning.

Orrin Hatch

#47. I had received a t-shirt from my best friend Veronica at my police academy graduation. It reads, 'Throw your donut in the opposite direction and the cops won't get you.' I love wearing that t-shirt.

Suzie Ivy

#48. School is the same as anything else. You do it because you're told to do it when you're little enough to listen. You continue because someone told you it was important. It's like you're a train in a tunnel. Graduation is the light at the end.

A.S. King

#49. Education no longer stops on graduation day. We must demand excellence at every level of education.

William J. Clinton

#50. At graduation, I assumed I'd be in publishing, but first I went to England and got a master's degree in English Literature. And then I came back to New York and had a series of publishing jobs, the way one does.

Joseph Kanon

#51. A university is not about results in the next quarter; it is not even about who a student has become by graduation. It is about learning that molds a lifetime, learning that transmits the heritage of millennia; learning that shapes the future

Drew Gilpin Faust

#52. Americans in particular are myopic. They're not traveling as much. When you were a college student, the next thing you would do on graduation was to take a year off and travel. That's what I did. I went to Indonesia.

Julie Taymor

#53. It's not a giant thing, like graduation, Mardi Gras, Halloween or New Year's. We do get business from it. That's why we put stuff out; we don't skip it. It's our big thing for March.

Suzanne Smith

#54. I decided to move out of the apartment I was sharing with my best friend before graduation and move back home. My parents had recently separated, and I wanted to move back home with my mom and my siblings.

Katherine Schwarzenegger

#55. I had the luxury of skipping the cabinet meeting to attend my daughter's graduation. So many people don't have the luxury of taking an hour away from the workplace to attend indispensable family commitments. We have to change that dynamic.

Thomas Perez

#56. The morning after my high-school graduation found me up early job hunting. The dream of college I put on the back burner.

Martha Reeves

#57. Following graduation from Amherst, a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship enabled me to test the depth of my interest in literary scholarship by beginning graduate studies at Harvard University.

Harold E. Varmus

#58. Whenever humans come together for any reason, music is there: weddings, funerals, graduation from college, men marching off to war, stadium sporting events, a night on the town, prayer, a romantic dinner, mothers rocking their infants to sleep ... music is a part of the fabric of everyday life.

Daniel Levitin

#59. Some are born great. Some achieve greatness. Some get it as a graduation gift.

Robin Williams

#60. The mission of Patrick Henry College was to attract and cultivate academic stars from the ranks of home-schooled evangelicals, then send them off on graduation day to 'shape the culture and take back the nation,' in the words of a common home-schooling rallying cry.

Nina Easton

#61. John and Jenny's planes arrived in Rome only hours apart. They had never imagined, when they walked away from each other graduation night 1960, it would be forty years and five thousand miles away before they would meet again.

Thomas Allen

#62. In the future I see open fields for more important researches. Psychology will be securely based on the foundation already laid by Mr. Herbert Spencer, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by graduation.

Charles Darwin

#63. I don't want to be in my meetings all sore or be at my son's graduation all sore just because of something I did in the past. (I'm) just learning and being smart.

Derrick Rose

#64. I didn't even go to graduation.

Brendon Urie

#65. For many, graduation marks the end of formal student life - the end of long spring breaks and of thinking that a 10 A.M. class is far too early.

Alexa Von Tobel

#66. I am terminally sentimental about graduations. They are more individual than weddings, more conscious than christenings, or bar mitzvahs or bat mitzvahs. They are almost as much a step into the unknown as funerals-though I assure you, there is life after graduation.

Gloria Steinem

#67. You might be a redneck if you think people that send out graduation announcements are show-offs.

Jeff Foxworthy

#68. Students who are put in a university who aren't qualified tend to have lower graduation rates, they have lower grades, they have lower bar passage rates. You can demonstrate that. You are putting them in position where they are not set up to succeed.

Mary Kissel

#69. I sewed good wishes and thoughts into my garments, especially so if they were wedding or graduation dresses.

Anne Ellis

#70. It means you have until graduation to make her yours. After that, I'm doing all I can to make her mine, and I won't quit until I do, brother.

N.E. Henderson

#71. Don't be afraid to make an ass of yourself. I do it all the time, and look what I got. (Spoken at a graduation ceremony while holding aloft an honorary doctoral degree from McGill University)

William Shatner

#72. I disagree with a lot of those changes, however at the end of the day - I go down to recruit graduation at least once or twice a year.

R. Lee Ermey

#73. Graduation day was a milestone in the most important journey of all - to the centre of oneself.

Quentin Bryce

#74. After graduation, I was floundering in L.A., doing stand-up comedy and working in a shoe store in the Valley.

Kevin Spacey

#75. Lydia shrugged. "At least we'll have some stories to tell after graduation."
"These aren't the kind of stories I want to tell.

C.K. Walker

#76. Today's "issue" had come all the way down from the System level, where some pinhead wanted to tie each campus's funding directly to its graduation rates.

Mark Panek

#77. Those words are from Lynda Barry's novel 'Cruddy.' I've carried them with me for some time. There's a lot in my life I wasn't expecting. One is the realization that I stood at this pulpit and delivered a reading for my own graduation ... 15 years ago. Unexpectedly, I'm old.

Jack Dorsey

#78. At the end of four years' time, at graduation, we were down to 12. At our reunion that we had several years ago, only 1 out of the 52 actually made it to ordination and priesthood. So there you go, there's your numbers.

Peter Jurasik

#79. The last days before graduation are bad enough, God knows
out of the womb you go, ready or not. The halls rang with the laughter of the girls who were going to be brides in the next week (and widows shortly after) ...

Elizabeth Savage

#80. The most important day of a person's education is the first day of school, not Graduation Day.

Harry Wong

#81. school graduation. I love him, even though the times - a lot of times I really needed it - he couldn't say, 'I'm here.

Nora Roberts

#82. On the hot, fragrant afternoon of my graduation from college it seemed that good fortune was not merely latent but unavoidable, folded and in the bag.

Geoffrey Wolff

#83. I went to a public high school, and after graduation, college wasn't really much of an option for me. I didn't believe I had the money or the grades at the time, so I continued to work and save money to support my acting career.

Christie Laing

#84. One of the most difficult speeches to prepare is an address to a graduation class, which is why I don't often do them.

Jerry Moran

#85. You know, sometimes I'll go to an 8th-grade graduation and there's all that pomp and circumstance and gowns and flowers. And I think to myself, it's just 8th grade ... An 8th-grade education doesn't cut it today. Let's give them a handshake and tell them to get their butts back in the library!

Barack Obama

#86. Every in group distinguishes itself from the outgroup by some process of "going through the mill" or enduring sufferings which are subsequently worn as the proud badge of graduation

Alan W. Watts

#87. I received $100 per week when I started working at the Globe after graduation.

Will McDonough

#88. I had never really given any thought to working for the CIA, but graduation was upon me; I was getting married just a week or two after graduation; I had no job, no prospects for a job. And so I said sure, I'd be interested in working for the CIA.

John Kiriakou

#89. If you're picking your best friend based on what kind of clothes she wears or how popular she is, chances are you aren't going to stay in touch after graduation.

Renee Olstead

#90. It's not how much you spend, it's how you spend it. We have been putting a lot of money into education in the state of Nevada, and it's gotten us to 50th in the country in graduation rates. We needed more accountability in our system.

Brian Sandoval

#91. I have the loving support of my girlfriend who still attends Wake Forest and is nearing graduation. She helps me cope with the everyday rigors of being an NBA player.

Tim Duncan

#92. When are you getting married?'
'After graduation, stupid.

Paul Zindel

#93. GUYS, Owen Meany said. That spring, less than a month before Gravesend Academy's graduation exercises, the TV showed us a map of Thailand; five thousand U.S. Marines and fifty jet fighters were being

John Irving

#94. People in my family and camp who grew up listening to rap music love 'We Are Young.' I've heard it play at weddings. I've heard it in graduation parties. It's a big idea and big song.

Janelle Monae

#95. My daughter finished high school the same month I got my master's degree. I'm glad I didn't know when I gave birth to her at 21 what it would cost in terms of time, money and sacrifice to bring her to that graduation day.

Regina Brett

#96. It was only when I finished the course and left my graduation diploma on the bus that I realised I'd become an actor.

James D'arcy

#97. Since graduation, I have measured time in 4-by-5-inch pieces of paper, four days on the left and three on the right. Every social engagement, interview, reading, flight, doctor's appointment, birthday and dry-cleaning reminder has been handwritten between metal loops.

Sloane Crosley

#98. When my mother took her turn to sit in a gown at her graduation, she thought she only had two career options: nursing and teaching. She raised me and my sister to believe that we could do anything, and we believed her.

Sheryl Sandberg

#99. My first jobs after graduation in 1955 were as a project engineer for G.E. and later with the U.S. government in Washington, D.C., where I met and married my wife, Dolores Celini.

Oliver E. Williamson

#100. Graduation speeches force you to reflect. They are about consciousness. Nothing is better than consciousness.

Bruce Eric Kaplan