Commencement Address Quotes

Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.
[Commencement Address, Wellesley College, 1996] ~ Nora Ephron

Broad-Based Education:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.

- Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005 ~ George Beahm

And remember whatever discipline you're in, whether you're a musician or a photographer, fine artist or a cartoonist, writer, a dancer, a singer, a designer... whatever you do, you have a thing that's unique. You have the ability to make art. ~ Neil Gaiman

Now listen up - you cannot let a fear of failure, or a fear of comparison, or a fear of judgement, stop you from doing what's going to make you great. You cannot succeed without this risk of failure. You cannot have a voice without the risk of criticism. And you cannot love without the risk of loss. You must go out and you must take these risks.
Everything I'm truly proud of in this life has been a terrifying prospect to me - from my first play, to hosting 'Saturday Night Live', to getting married, to being a father, to speaking to you today. None of it comes easy. And people will tell you to do what makes you happy, but a lot of these has been hard work, and I'm not always happy.
And I don't think you should do just what makes you happy. I think you should do what makes you great. Do what's uncomfortable, and scary, and hard but pays off in the long run.
Be willing to fail. Let yourselves fail. Fail in a place, in a way you would want to fail. Fail, pick yourself up, and fail again. Because without this struggle, what is your success anyway? ~ Charlie Day

Nora Ephron explained in a 1996 commencement address at her alma mater, Wellesley College, about her own graduating class of 1962: "We weren't meant to have futures, we were meant to marry them. We weren't meant to have politics, or careers that mattered, or opinions or lives; we were meant to marry them. If you wanted to be an architect, you married an architect." Both ~ Rebecca Traister

Author and screenwriter Neil Gaiman, in a 2012 commencement address at the University of the Arts, said that excellence in business can be boiled down to three simple things: 1. Be Efficient: Turn in work on time. 2. Be Effective: Do great work. 3. Be Congenial: Be a pleasure to work with.1 Gaiman added that even mastering two of the three will take you far. If you do great work and are a pleasure to work with, most people will forgive you for missing a deadline. If you're always on time and a pleasure to work with, most people put up with less than perfect work. If you turn in great work on time, most people will put up with you being unpleasant. ~ Brad Lomenick

In his 1978 Harvard commencement address, Solzhenitsyn listed a litany of woes facing the West: the loss of courage and will, the addiction to comfort, the abuse of freedom, the capitulation of intellectuals to fashionable ideas, the attitude of appeasement with evil. ~ Charles W. Colson

In my commencement address I gave the language and sources of the prophetic utterance made by the Prophet Joseph that the Constitution of the United States would hang by a single thread, but be saved by the elders of Israel. I hope you will read those sources so you will be well-informed as to this prophecy and be prepared to do your part in its fulfillment. ~ Ernest L. Wilkinson

Because you are human beings you are going to meet failure. You are going to meet disappointment, injustice, betrayal, and irreparable loss. You will find you're weak where you thought yourself strong. You'll work for possessions and then find they possess you. You will find yourself - as I know you already have - in dark places, alone, and afraid.

What I hope for you, for all my sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, is that you will be able to live there, in the dark place. To live in the place that our rationalizing culture of success denies, calling it a place of exile, uninhabitable, foreign.

From "A Left-Handed Commencement Address," Mills College 1983 ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

If you think that happiness means total peace, you will never be happy. Peace comes from the acceptance of the part of you that can never be at peace. It will always be in conflict. If you accept that, everything gets a lot better. ~ Joss Whedon

And that's why I've been talking only about you and the tension within you, because you are - not in a clichéd sense, but in a weirdly literal sense - the future. After you walk up here and walk back down, you're going to be the present. You will be the broken world and the act of changing it, in a way that you haven't been before. You will be so many things, and the one thing that I wish I'd known and want to say is, don't just be yourself. Be all of yourselves. Don't just live. Be that other thing connected to death. Be life. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun. ~ Joss Whedon

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility, or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law, or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.
You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self-improvement. ~ J.K. Rowling

As Steve Jobs said in his now legendary commencement address at Stanford, "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life." There ~ Arianna Huffington

And then I picked up the nearest object-a shoe-and threw it at Jack's head.
"What are you doing in here, you little weasle?"
He picked up my shoe from where it had clattered to the floor after hitting the door behind him. "How do you walk in these heels?" He sat and removed his own shoe,trying to jam his foot into my purple sling-back.
I stalked over and yanked it awway. "What are you, five? Answer my question."
He looked up at me, impossibly big blue eyes wide with innocence. "I thought we were friends, after you made me strip and all."
"I'm calling Raquel."
"Fine,fine. I was just doing some reconnaissance?"
"Reconnaissance?"
"Oh,sorry,that's a big word,isn't it? It means I was scoping the scene, getting the-"
"I know what it means! What,is IPCA investigating me now? Screw them, they can forget about any help from-"
"Do you ever let anyone else finish a sentence?" He smiled at my glare, flashing his dimples. "That's more like it. You're much prettier when you aren't talking. True of most people, I've found. Anyhow, I needed to see the address Raquel gave me so that I could find it again. ~ Kiersten White

When you frack a well, you're exploding methane up into the atmosphere. So, Barack Obama, by supporting natural gas, and also talking about climate change is literally burning his own inaugural address. And he's doing it with natural gas. ~ Josh Fox

A war changes people in a number of ways. It either shortcuts you to your very self; or it triggers such variations that you might as well have been a larva, pupating in dampness, darkness and tightly wrapped puttees. Then, providing you don't take flight from a burst shell, you emerge from your khaki cocoon so changed from what you were that you fear you've gone mad, because people at home treat you as though you were someone else. Someone who, through a bizarre coincidence, had the same name, address and blood ties as you, but who must have died in the war. And you have no choice but to live as an impostor because you can't remember who you were before the war. There's a simple but horrible explanation for this: you were born in the war. You slid, slick, bloody and fully formed, out of a trench.
The Great War was the greatest changer of them all. ~ Ann-Marie MacDonald

Can a little speck in the vast universe truly address the Infinite? The answer is that Prayer is precisely what converts that little speck into an entity of inestimable and cosmic significance. ~ Jeff Cohen

Officially, the New Testament church at an early stage took seriously their responsibility for widows who lacked family or other resources. The office of deacon was instituted initially to address this pressing need. ~ Carolyn Custis James

Love is a force that can't be forced.
Let it find you. It knows your address and who it is supposed to deliver within your path will be shipped to you unexpectedly.
Be sure that your life isn't cluttered and that your heart is ready enough to welcome it.
You will find "Nemo," before you ever find love, let it find you. ~ Pierre Alex Jeanty

Tearing out a sheet, she wrote her address on it and froze as she considered a pen name. Something starting with her first initial, the one she shared with Judy.
What should it be? She thought about her usual nicknames, Jesster and Jess. But those were what her family called her. Too special to give to a stranger. Maybe something starting with a J and an e? The word came to her in a flash. Jem. Unlike anything she'd ever read or heard before, short and easy to write, and still a little bit close to her real name. ~ Kate Willis

All we shared was a mattress, and a lie, and an address
Baby I don't need you, well baby I don't need you
Once occupied by a goddess, now it's a room full of boxes
She said, "it's time to leave you" but baby I don't need you!
In a perfect world ... her face would not exist
In a perfect world ... a broken heart is fixed ~ Billy Talent

The nation was founded and "dedicated," to use Lincoln's language in the "Gettysburg Address," to equality as a "self-evident truth." But this very principle of equality, as Lincoln also noted, was a "proposition." To make it a reality remained "the unfinished work" of Americans. ~ Ronald Takaki

We were the letters sent to the wrong address,
but opened anyway. ~ Andrea Gibson

I have argued that the God of the Bible, and especially of the Gospels, can be understood only as God-in-public, and that methods of criticism designed to keep this rumor quiet need to be challenged by appropriate historical, theological, and political critique and replaced by methods that do justice to the reality of the texts and hence do justice - in the much fuller sense - in the public world that the Gospels demand to address. ~ N. T. Wright

Size matters in fiction, but so does lack of size. Everything else being equal, fat novels tend to be perceived as serious, very thin ones as more honest, more real. Writers address these age-old expectations by filling their big books with philosophy and cramming their little ones with feeling. ~ Walter Kirn

The way in which the persecution of Galileo has been remembered is a tribute to the quiet commencement of the most intimate change in outlook which the human race had yet encountered. Since a babe was born in a manger, it may be doubted whether so great a thing has happened with so little stir ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Sandy and her community fought against a thing, and fought bravely, risking their sanity in resisting the actions of forces whose root causes they could not directly address. Kelly and his fought against people, leaving the actions of their enemies to others, but able to seek them out and fight directly against their foe, even eliminating them if they were lucky. One side had absolute purity of purpose but lacked satisfaction. The other could attain the satisfaction of destroying the enemy, but only at the cost of becoming too much like what they struggled against. ~ Tom Clancy

Either way ... you've got to tell him
in no uncertain terms
to knock it the fuck off already. Don't be measured, don't wrap it up in "I" statements, no mewling about your feelings. Give him both barrels: "If you don't knock it the fuck off ... I'm going to kick your ass out, got it?" A strategic blowup or two should occur
scream, yell, smash a few things you're not all that attached to
when he slips up. Repeat until his attitude changes or his address does. ~ Dan Savage

Nissan is recalling almost 135,000 Infiniti G35s to address an airbag problem. When Toyota heard that, they said, 'Airbags! I knew we forgot something.' ~ Jimmy Fallon

You can almost always find something in common with another person, and from there, it's much easier to address issues where you have differences. Sports cut across boundaries of race and wealth. And if nothing else, we all have the weather in common. ~ Randy Pausch

People said there had to be a Supreme Being because otherwise how could the universe exist, eh?
And of course there clearly had to be, said Koomi, a Supreme Being. But since the universe was a bit of a mess, it was obvious that the Supreme Being hadn't in fact made it. If he had made it he would, being Supreme, have made a better job of it, with far better thought given, taking an example at random, to things like the design of the common nostril. Or, to put it another way, the existence of a badly put-together watch proved the existence of a blind watchmaker. You only had to look around to see that there was room for improvement practically everywhere. This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush by an underling while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country.
So, reasoned Koomi, it was not a good idea to address any prayers to a Supreme Being. It would only attract his attention and might cause trouble. ~ Terry Pratchett

So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him. ~ Margaret Atwood

This I said in the Irish way, about which there is allowed to be something very engaging. It's a remarkable thing, and a testimony to the love with which our nation is regarded, that this address scarce ever fails in a handsome fellow. I cannot tell how often I have seen a private soldier escape the horse, or a beggar wheedle out a good alms, by a touch of the brogue. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson

I am confident that we can overcome this crisis, provided that we remain united in our effort to address our debt and competitiveness problems. And I think that the Greek people are united; it's important also that the political forces are united in line with the will of the Greek people. ~ Lucas Papademos

Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it? ~ Mark Twain

We can choose to address the twin issues of population and consumption to rebalance the use of resources to a more egalitarian pattern of consumption. ~ John Sulston

I know you are busy pulling the wool over my eyes but you may want to address the inconsistencies in your persona first. ~ Et Imperatrix Noctem

If you notice that devil hinder your work or demons disturb your family etc., then address them and cast them out of your circumstances ~ Sunday Adelaja

But why does it matter what we call it, as long as there is concerted action to respond to and prevent such crimes? It matters because if we really want to fix something that is broken, if we want to heal these fractures in our society, then we need to understand their causes. If we do not, then we will forever continue to place giant sticking plasters over the wounds left by this violence, trying to bandage over losses that can never be replaced. As long as this violence continues, it is obviously the case that we do have to address the symptoms, but my argument is that we must also address the causes if we want a long-term reduction or even, perhaps, the eventual eradication of male violence against women. ~ Finn Mackay

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey aro ~ George Whitman

This column was an attempt to convey to British readers something of the flavor of high-school graduation, a ritual largely unknown across the Atlantic and one at odds with the basic organizing principle of English education: The continual assurances by commencement speakers that yours is the most awesome generation ever to walk the earth ring a little odd if you're a survivor of some grim Dotheboys Hall where the prevailing educational philosophy was to lower your self-esteem to undetectable levels by the end of the first week. ~ Mark Steyn

Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65. ~ Richard Ford

I have always been attracted to apostrophe, perhaps because of its resemblance to prayer. A voice reaches out to something beyond itself that cannot answer it. I find that moving in part because it enacts what is true of all address and communication on some level - it cannot fully be heard, understood, or answered. ~ Mary Szybist

My name, sir, is Virgilia Wessex. I am a Sunday school teacher from Sussex, England, and I have given you no leave to address me as anything."
His mouth seemed to almost smile, but if so, he caught it just on the brink and decided against it. "Well, I've just given the gent who found you first an obscene amount of money to address you however I please ... Gillia. ~ V.S. Carnes

It uses the greatest random-access indexing system ever invented - one that computer scientists haven't come even close to replicating. Whereas an index in the back of a book provides a single address - a page number - for each important subject, each subject in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of addresses. Our internal memories are associational, nonlinear. You don't need to know where a particular memory is stored in order to find it. It simply turns up - or doesn't - when you need it. Because of the dense network that interconnects our memories, we can skip around from memory to memory and idea to idea very rapidly. ~ Joshua Foer

We are close to a time when all of humankind will envision a global agenda that encompasses a kind of Global Marshall Plan to address the causes of poverty and suffering and environmental destruction all over the earth. ~ Al Gore

Wild beach is my primordial address. ~ Talismanist Giebra

We have a paralysis in Washington that's not serving our country. We have to address these issues. ~ Rob Portman

Often, when I pray, I wonder if I'm not posting letters to a non-existent address. ~ C.S. Lewis

Love what you do. Get good at it. Competence is a rare commodity in this day and age. And let the chips fall where they man. ~ Jon Stewart

Theater has an incredible capacity to move people to social change, to address issues, to inspire social revolution. ~ Eve Ensler

In a prime-time address, President Bush said he backed limited federal funding for stem cell research. That's right, the President said, this is a quote, the research could help cure brain diseases like Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and whatever it is I have. ~ Conan O'Brien

No amount of psychological therapy or group training can effectively address racism in this country, unless we also begin to dismantle the structures of racism. ~ Angela Y. Davis

Another success is the post-office, with its educating energy augmented by cheapness and guarded by a certain religious sentimentin mankind; so that the power of a wafer or a drop of wax or gluten to guard a letter, as it flies over sea over land and comes to its address as if a battalion of artillery brought it, I look upon as a fine meter of civilization. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Give a boy address and accomplishments and you give him the mastery of palaces and fortunes where he goes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you notice someone does something toxic the first time, don't wait for the second time before you address it or cut them off.

Many survivors are used to the "wait and see" tactic which only leaves them vulnerable to a second attack. As your boundaries get stronger, the wait time gets shorter. You never have justify your intuition. ~ Shahida Arabi

That this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
- President Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg address, November 19, 1863 ~ Abraham Lincoln

President Bush gave his first-ever presidential radio address in both English and Spanish. Reaction was mixed, however, as people were trying to figure out which one was which. ~ Dennis Miller

In fact, there did not seem to be any limit to what Grof's LSD subjects could tap into. They seemed capable of knowing what it was like to be every animal, and even plant, on the tree of evolution. They could experience what it was like to be a blood cell, an atom, a thermonuclear process inside the sun, the consciousness of the entire planet, and even the consciousness of the entire cosmos. More than that, they displayed the ability to transcend space and time, and occasionally they related uncannily accurate precognitive information. In an even stranger vein they sometimes encountered nonhuman intelligences during their cerebral travels, discarnate beings, spirit guides from "higher planes of consciousness, " and other suprahuman entities. On occasion subjects also traveled to what appeared to be other universes and other levels of reality. In one particularly unnerving session a young man suffering from depression found himself in what seemed to be another dimension. It had an eerie luminescence, and although he could not see anyone he sensed that it was crowded with discarnate beings. Suddenly he sensed a presence very close to him, and to his surprise it began to communicate with him telepathically. It asked him to please contact a couple who lived in the Moravian city of Kromeriz and let them know that their son Ladislav was well taken care of and doing all right. It then gave him the couple's name, street address, and telephone number. The information meant nothing to ~ Michael Talbot