80 Inspirational Graduation Quotes

If you are trying to figure out your next steps in life, read these inspirational graduation quotes!

02/05/2019 12:00:00h

80 Inspirational Graduation Quotes | iSTOCK

Inspirational graduation quotes

You are beginning a new period in your life in which you have to take a lot of important decisions and which you never had to face before. You are becoming an adult, and the paths you choose now are the ones which will determine the person that you are going to be.

These decisions are usually hard to make, especially if we aren't sure where we see ourselves in the near future. Many questions will drown our head during this period, and reflection will be our main activity. To help you understand who you want to be, we have made a compilation of the best inspirational graduation quotes to give you the push and motivation that you need.

1“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

2"Sometimes you find out what you are supposed to be doing by doing the things you are not supposed to do."

Oprah Winfrey

3“Success doesn’t rush. The greatest reward is the journey!”

Jeff Moore

4"Nothing builds self-esteem and self-confidence like accomplishment."

Thomas Carlyle

5“Before you act, listen. Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

William Arthur Ward

6“There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. Wouldn’t you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become. This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders, or your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more everyday like a photograph coming into focus.”

Jodie Foster

7"Be bold, be courageous, be your best."

Gabrielle Giffords

8“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

9"You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream."

C.S. Lewis

10“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

11“Do all the other things, the ambitious things—travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes…but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness.”

George Saunders

12Don’t be trapped by dogma—which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

Steve Jobs

13“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.

14"Never lose sight of the fact that just being is fun."

Katherine Hepburn

15"The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each one of you is a fuse."

Edward Koch

16“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”

Henry Ford

17“Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.”

Nora Ephron

18"You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship."

David Foster

19“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.”

C.S. Lewis

20"Be in love with your life. Every minute of it."

Jack Kerouac

21“The important thing is not to stop questioning.”

Albert Einsten

22“An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest.”

Benjamin Franklin

23"From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art."

Toni Morrison

24“Accept responsibility for your life. Know that it is you who will get you where you want to go, no one else.”

Les Brown

25“The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future.”

Plato

26"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

27“The highest result of education is tolerance.”

Hellen Keller

28"A world where men ran half our homes and women ran half our institutions would be just a much better world."

Sheryl Sandberg

29“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

30"One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful."

Sigmund Freud

31“Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

32“Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.”

Martin Luther King Jr.

33"There is no script. Live your life. Soak it all in."

Dick Costolo

34“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

35"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

Eleanor Roosevelt

36“It is absolutely still possible to make a difference.”

Michelle Obama

37"I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve."

Maya Angelou

38"But real leadership comes from the quiet nudging of an inner voice. It comes from realizing that the time has come to move beyond waiting to doing."

Madeleine Albright

39“Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.”

Gandhi

40"Turns out, not where, but who you're with really matters."

Dave Matthews

41"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are."

E.E Cummings

42“The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you.”

B.B. King

43"Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work. The second is only part of the first."

Anna Quindlen

44“All our dreams can come true… if we have the courage to pursue them.”

Walt Disney

45"What matters most is how well you walk through the fire."

Charles Bukowski

46“The unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.”

Jon Stewart

47“Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today.”

Malcolm X

48"The most important thing in your life is to live your life with integrity and to not give into peer pressure to try to be something that you’re not."

Ellen DeGeneres

49“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.”

J.K. Rowling

50“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm”

Winston Churchill

51“To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream, not only plan, but also believe.”

Anatole France

52"Don’t be afraid of fear. Because it sharpens you, it challenges you, it makes you stronger; and when you run away from fear, you also run away from the opportunity to be your best possible self."

Ed Helms

53“Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.”

Ella Fitzgerald

54“Kid, you’ll move mountains.”

Dr. Seuss

55“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

56“Wherever you go, go with all your heart.”

Confucius

57“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

58"The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare."

Dale Carnegie

59“When you leave here, don’t forget why you came.”

Adlai E. Stevenson

60"Be compassionate to everyone. Don’t just search for whatever it is that annoys and frightens you, see beyond those things to the basic human being. Especially see the child in the man or woman. Even if they are destroying you, allow a moment to see how lost in their own delusion and suffering they are."

Alice Walker

61“There is no elevator to success, you have to take the stairs.”

Unknown

62“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

Thomas Edison

63"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

64“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”

Oscar Wilde

65“If you hear a voice within you say “you cannot paint,” then by all means paint and that voice will be silenced.”

Vincent Van Gogh

66“Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life.”

Frederick W. Robertson

67“Be willing to embrace wonder, to experience unexpected discovery, and to go in unknown directions… Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life’s hard classes.”

Melissa Harris-Perry

68“If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done.”

Thomas Jefferson

69“If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.”

Milton Berle

70“Intelligence without ambition is like a bird without wings.”

Salvador Dalí

71“In response to those who say to stop dreaming and face reality, I say keep dreaming and make reality.”

Kristian Kan

72“It doesn’t matter that your dream came true if you spent your whole life sleeping.”-

Jerry Zucker

73“Showing up is 80 percent of life.”

Woody Allen

74“Real courage is holding on to a still voice in your head that says, ‘I must keep going.’ It’s that voice that says nothing is a failure if it is not final. That voice that says to you, ‘Get out of bed. Keep going. I will not quit.’”

Cory Booker

75“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do, so throw off the bowlines, sail away from safe harbor, catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore, dream, discover.”

Mark Twain

76“Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun.”

Joss Whedon

77“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

78“You can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”

Jim Carrey

79“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

80“You have to dance a little bit before you step out into the world each day, because it changes the way you walk.”

Sandra Bullock

➡️ Inspirational