Graduation Quotes

Some go on to trade schools or get further training for jobs they are interested in. Some go into the arts, some are craftsmen, some take a little time out to travel, and some start their own businesses. But our graduates find and work at what they want to do.

The essays in The Great Taos Bank Robbery were my project to win a Master of Arts degree in English when I quit being a newspaper editor and went back to college.

I went through withdrawal when I got out of graduate school. It’s what you learn, what you think. That’s all that counts.

When I was going for my graduate degree, I decided I was going to make a feature film as my thesis. That’s what I was famous for-that I had my thesis film be a feature film, which was ‘You’re a Big Boy Now.’

I would say the most memorable thing that has ever happened to me has to be when I got my First class honours Law degree at my University graduation. All my family from all over the world were there when I collected my degree. I will never forget that day.

I have the cliche ‘struggling actor’ story. I was waiting tables in New York, went out to L.A. soon after graduation to get some jobs, but it didn’t work out. I wanted to cut my teeth in professional theater, so I came back to New York. It made my journey a longer one, but I really wanted to excel in the theater.

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.

I studied journalism at Binghamton University, even interning for NBC’s longtime anchor Carol Jenkins. Before graduation, I told my parents I wanted to pursue broadcast journalism.

For a man to attain to an eminent degree in learning costs him time, watching, hunger, nakedness, dizziness in the head, weakness in the stomach, and other inconveniences.

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.

Remember, half the doctors in this country graduated in the bottom half of their class.

At the School of Visual Arts in New York, you can get your degree in Net art, which is really a fantastic way of thinking of theater in new ways.

I’m very thankful I went to college, because I’ve seen the difference that it makes for me in the professional world. After graduation, I was building a name for myself in the Chicago theater scene, but there was always this pull to L.A.

I’ve always been short and stocky. So when I got into repertory theatre after graduation, I found myself doing character roles: because of my deep voice, shape and height, I was playing 40-year-old, 50-year-old roles at the age of 23.

I woke up on May 15, 1991, the day of my Barnard graduation, and I said to myself, ‘By the end of today you will decide what you want to do with the rest of your life.’

Thirty days after high-school graduation, I went straight into the Marines.

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.

I started with a television serial, ‘Just Mohabbat,’ when I was in the first year of my graduation.

I didn’t even go to graduation.

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.

All my graduation money went to paying for bartending classes so I could have a side gig. I bartended for two months before I was supposed to move to New York and then two months later I got the job as an understudy in ‘Sister Act’ and haven’t looked back since.

I was into movies before my graduation results got out. In fact, I was on location of a movie when they came.

I missed out on a few proms, homecomings, might miss my graduation. I wouldn’t want it any other way… it’s worth it.

The day after my high school graduation in 1952, I headed to Alaska. I was 17. I started out greasing equipment, then became a heavy-crane operator. I made and saved good money there for two years.

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

So in my uncertainty, I went to graduate school and there it all happened.

You must realize that honorary degrees are given generally to people whose SAT scores were too low to get them into schools the regular way. As a matter of fact, it was my SAT scores that led me into my present vocation in life, comedy.

I quit drinking in 2002, mere months before my college graduation.

When nearly a third of our high school students do not graduate on time with their peers, we have work to do. We must design our middle and high schools so that no student gets lost in the crowd and disconnected from his or her own potential.

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.

This man used to go to school with his dog. Then they were separated. His dog graduated!

I am a Punjabi at heart, but I’ve been born & brought up in Mumbai and even did my schooling & graduation from Mumbai itself.

I didn’t get my degree at NYU; I got it later, they gave me an honourary one.

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

Simple health interventions such as lead paint abatement and home visiting for pregnant women result in not only improved health for children but also higher rates of graduation, reduced crime, and a more robust workforce.

I was a radio jockey after graduation. I was 22, the youngest RJ in Delhi at that time.

I started training at a local gym in New Jersey, and the day of my high school graduation, I packed up everything in my car and moved to Coconut Creek, Florida, where I trained with one of the best gyms in the world, American Top Team.

No graduation speaker will ever tell you that the future is anything but uncertain. It never is. But graduations need not only be obsessed with looking ahead; a graduation can be a day on which we turn back and trace our steps to see how we ended up where we are.

There were a couple of months when I was approaching graduation where I started to think of graduating from college as the afterlife. Because it’s this kind of crazy thing that you always know you’re going to finish school inevitably, but nobody ever really tells you what happens afterwards.

Even though I disagree with many of the changes, when I see the privates graduate at the end of the day, when they walk off that drill field at the end of the ceremony, they are still fine privates; outstanding, well motivated privates.

Being considerate of others will take your children further in life than any college degree.

I think I finally chose the graduate degree in engineering primarily because it only took one year and law school took three years, and I felt the pressure of being a little behind – although I was just 22.

I graduated a the top of my class in the ’84 Olympic Games; I won a gold medal.

In my second year in graduate school, I took a computer course and that was like lightening striking.

Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.

My roots are in music. But Eileen Ford saw my high school graduation picture, and next thing I knew I was on a plane to New York. That’s what threw a monkey wrench in it. The modeling.

You are graduating from college. That means that this is the first day of the last day of your life. No, that’s wrong. This is the last day of the first day of school. Nope, that’s worse. This is a day.

After completing my graduation, I went to Mumbai and started working as an assistant casting director. I worked on films like ‘Talaash,’ ‘Ek Mai Aur Ekk Tu,’ ‘Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani’ and ‘Student Of The Year,’ among others.

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings, not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations, but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process, and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all, suffering will cease.

I don’t remember at all what was said at my college graduation, and I think that’s the case for many people.

By the time he arrived in Texas – via the red 1947 Studebaker Dad’s parents gave him as a graduation gift – he was ready for the challenge of making his way in the oil business.

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

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.

I’m not sure if they do this in the States, but in Korea, until high school, on your graduation diploma there’s a line that states your future goal. Kids write ‘president’ or ‘astronaut,’ or whatever. I always wrote ‘singer.’

Never go to your high school reunion pregnant or they will think that is all you have done since you graduated.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

I have a good cry once in a while; it’s such a great release. Or it could be a cry of joy – watching your child being born or your child walking across a graduation stage.

ACT and SAT each have their own parts of the country. The GRE has its lock on graduate admissions. And so, one could blame the companies, but really, economically, they have no incentive to change things very much because they’re getting the business.

I went to Legoland in Denmark when I was five, I think, but I went to Germany when I was 17 to have a little adventure after graduation.

North Dakota State. What do you have to do there to graduate? Milk a cow with your left hand?

After graduation, I took a job with Manufacturers Hanover Trust in software development. I don’t think I was there more than a month.

I vividly remember my first meeting with Farooque Shaikh. It was in 1975. I had just returned from New York after completing my graduation and was looking for opportunities to begin a career as an actor.

From kindergarten to graduation, I went to public schools, and I know that they are a key to being sure that every child has a chance to succeed and to rise in the world.

College graduates should not have to live out their 20s in their childhood bedrooms, staring up at fading Obama posters and wondering when they can move out and get going with life.

I have done my post graduation in Business Administration.

No one has ever asked me to give a graduation speech. But in my years of working with aspiring entrepreneurs, many of them in college, I’ve gotten used to giving advice.

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.

Just after graduation in 1966, like many of my contemporaries, I applied for research training at the National Institutes of Health. Perhaps because his wife was a poet, Ira Pastan agreed to take me into his laboratory, despite my lack of scientific credentials.

In this outward and physical ceremony we attest once again to the inner and spiritual strength of our Nation. As my high school teacher, Miss Julia Coleman, used to say: ‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.’

I pretty much bailed on high school. I mean, I graduated, but I wasn’t even there for my own graduation.

I started traveling, performing, doing photo shoots and working on new music. At the same time, I was juggling homework and trying not to miss out on too many experiences during my junior and senior years – like prom and graduation.

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

The idea of winning a doctor’s degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

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

I was the girl that didn’t go to prom or my graduation because I was too busy working with producers and making music.

Having a college degree gave me the opportunity to be… well-rounded. Also, the people I met at the university, most of them are still my colleagues now. People I’ve known for years are all in the industry together.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

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

Almost 50 years old now, some 30 years after graduation, I look at my Caltech classmates and conclude that math whizzes do not take over the world.

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.

I was in Mumbai pursuing my graduation in mass media; I was not sure what to do. I tried my hand at a couple of different things. I joined an acting school after that and eventually things fell in place.

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.

I did get a degree in special education.

I always thought I would move to New York after graduation, but, instead, I moved to Los Angeles. I realized I was more scared of that choice than I was of New York, and I thought, at 22, I should get it over with.

Earlier today, Arnold Schwarzenegger criticized the California school system, calling it disastrous. Arnold says California’s schools are so bad that its graduates are willing to vote for me.

When I came to Chennai from Coimbatore after my graduation, looking for acting chances, it was for dubbing that I was first tried.

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.

Mentors provide professional networks, outlets for frustration, college and career counseling, general life advice, and most importantly, an extra voice telling a student they are smart enough and capable enough to cross the stage at graduation and land their first paycheck from a career pathway job.

I’m not impressed by someone’s degree… I’m impressed by them making movies.

Yale places great stress on undergraduate and graduate teaching. I like teaching, and I do a lot of it.

I was going to be an architect. I graduated with a degree in architecture and I had a scholarship to go back to Princeton and get my Masters in architecture. I’d done theatricals in college, but I’d done them because it was fun.

I was about to get a degree in economics when I accepted that I’d be a lousy businessman, and if I didn’t give acting a try I’d regret it for the rest of my life.

The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse.

Everybody wants you to do good things, but in a small town you pretty much graduate and get married. Mostly you marry, have children and go to their football games.

School days were very special to me as I never found the time to complete my graduation.

I could be happy doing something like architecture. It would involve another couple of years of graduate school, but that’s what I studied in college. That’s what I always wanted to do.

I did graduate with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1948.

I learned law so well, the day I graduated I sued the college, won the case, and got my tuition back.

I went to college at the University of Kansas, where I got a degree in political science.

I was given a new coat as a high school graduation gift.

I have no problems with private schools. I graduated from one and so did my mother. Private schools are useful and we often use public funds to pay for their infrastructures and other common needs.

After graduating in the summer of 1980, I knew I wanted my life to count.

When I graduated college I had a series of just humiliating jobs that I couldn’t believe I was at.

You know what has made me the happiest I’ve ever been? Seeing my son and daughter graduate from college. More than wanting them to be educated, I wanted them to be nice people. To see that they have become both is just a wonderful thing.

In 1858 I received the degree of D. S. from the Lawrence Scientific School, and thereafter remained on the rolls of the university as a resident graduate.

It is soooooo necessary to get the basic skills, because by the time you graduate, undergraduate or graduate, that field would have totally changed from your first day of school.

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.

The college graduate is presented with a sheepskin to cover his intellectual nakedness.

Every time I attend an FBI graduation for new agents or new analysts at Quantico, a significant number of those graduates are former state and local officers, and I have the privilege of shaking their hands, presenting them with their credentials, and welcoming them to the FBI family.

One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark’s Saturday night ‘American Bandstand’ show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.