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100 Timeless Quips & Quotes for Recent College Grads

June 13th, 2010

Emerging into the real world after graduation can be a time of great excitement but also one of great trepidation. Here are some quotes that can help offer some sage advice, insight and guidance to make your transition from college to the working world a little less scary.

On Graduation

In these quotes, great thinkers, politicians and businesspeople speak on what graduation means to them.

1. Orrin Hatch: There is a good reason they call these ceremonies "commencement exercises." Graduation is not the end; it’s the beginning.
2. Arie Pencovici: 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.
3. Adlai Stevenson: When you leave here, don’t forget why you came.
4. Tom Brokaw: 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.
5. Author Unknown: The future lies before you, Like a field of driven snow, Be careful how you tread it, For every step will show.
6. Newton D. Baker: The man who graduates today and stops learning tomorrow is uneducated the day after.
7. Dr. Seuss: You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes.You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. You’re on your own. And you know what you know. You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.
8. Carly Fiorina: The truth is, I was afraid the day I walked into Stanford. And I was afraid the day I walked out.
9. Oscar Wilde: Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.
10. e.e. cummings: It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.
11. Catherine Pulsifer: Graduation is a time of completion, of finishing, of an ending, however, it is also a time of celebration of achievement and a beginning for the new graduate.
12. Arie Pencovici: 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.

On Education

These quotes promote the virtues of education.

13. Louis L’Amour: The best of all things is to learn. Money can be lost or stolen, health and strength may fail, but what you have committed to your mind is yours forever.
14. Mahatma Gandhi: Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.
15. John Updike: You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it.
16. Nelson Mandela: Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.
17. Aristotle: The roots of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet.
18. Will Durant: Education is a progressive discovery of our ignorance.
19. Theodore Roosevelt: A man who has never gone to school may steal from a freight car; but if he has a university education he may steal the whole railroad.
20. Jean Piaget: The principal goal of education is to create men who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done.
21. Andre Gide: The only real education comes from what goes counter to you.
22. John Dewey: The result of the educative process is capacity for further education.
23. Galileo Galilei: You cannot teach a man anything; you can only help him find it within himself.
24. William Butler Yeats: Education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire.

Inspiration

These quotes will inspire you to achieve in your life after graduation.

25. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Hitch your wagon to a star.
26. Confucius: Wherever you go, go with all your heart.
27. Ralph Waldo Emerson: What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.
28. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Do not follow where the path may lead. Go, instead, where there is no path and leave a trail.
29. Mark Twain: Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.
30. Robert Louis Stevenson: Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.
31. Terri Guillemets: There is no need to reach high for the stars. They are already within you – just reach deep into yourself!
32. Marianne Williamson: Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
33. Eleanor Roosevelt: The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
34. Henry David Thoreau: Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.
35. Arthur C. Clarke: The only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible.
36. William Arthur Ward: If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.

Motivation

No matter what you want to do in life, these quotes will motivate you to get it done.

37. David Lloyd George: Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.
38. Fred Dehner: The best helping hand that you will ever receive is the one at the end of your own arm.
39. Henry Ford: Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.
40. Ralph Marston: Excellence is not a skill. It is an attitude.
41. Arnold Palmer: The most rewarding things in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done.
42. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Dream no small dreams for they have the power to move the hearts of men.
43. Carl Sandberg: Nothing happens unless it is first a dream.
44. Ralph Waldo Emerson: It was a high counsel that I once heard given to a young person, ‘Always do what you are afraid to do.’
45. Robert Frost: The best way out is always through.
46. Samuel Johnson: Nothing will ever be attempted if all possible objections must first be overcome.
47. Publius Terence: Fortune favors the brave.
48. Theodore Roosevelt: Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.
49. Helen Keller: One can never consent to creep when one feels the impulse to soar.

Choosing a Career

Use these quotes to help you choose a career wisely.

50. Jim Fox: My father always told me,’Find a job you love and you’ll never have to work a day in your life.’
51. William Lyon Phelps: Whenever it is possible, a boy should choose some occupation which he should do even if he did not need the money.
52. Abraham Maslow: A musician must make his music, an artist must paint, a poet must write if he is to ultimately be at peace with himself.
53. Margaret Young: Often people attempt to live their lives backwards: they try to have more things, or more money, in order to do more of what they want so that they will be happier. The way it actually works is the reverse. You must first be who you really are, then, do what you need to do, in order to have what you want.
54. Arnold Toynbee: The supreme accomplishment is to blur the line between work and play.
55. Guatama Buddha: Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
56. Katherine Hepburn: If you have to support yourself, you had bloody well better find some way that is going to be interesting.
57. Anonymous: Different people have different duties assigned to them by nature; Nature has given one the power or the desire to do this, the other that. Each bird must sing with his own throat.
58. Stephen Jay Gould: Any human being is really good at certain things. The problem is that the things you’re good at come naturally. And since most people are pretty modest instead of an arrogant s.o.b. like me, what comes naturally, you don’t see as a special skill. It’s just you. It’s what you’ve always done.
59. Julia Cameron: What we really want to do is what we are really meant to do. When we do what we are meant to do, money comes to us, doors open for us, we feel useful, and the work we do feels like play to us.

Work

Here you’ll find a collection of quotes to help you make the most of your work experience.

60. Harold Geneen: In the business world, everyone is paid in two coins: cash and experience. Take the experience first; the cash will come later.
61. H. Jackson Brown, Jr.: Don’t waste time learning the "tricks of the trade." Instead, learn the trade.
62. William Arthur Ward: Wise are those who learn that the bottom line doesn’t always have to be their top priority.
63. Henry Ford: A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
64. Michelangelo: If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful after all.
65. Dean Kamen: Why change the world? To me that’s what life is about. If you don’t do that, you might as well hibernate and sleep. If everyone thinks what you do is "normal" . . . it probably is. Why do that? Do something else!
66. Oscar Wilde: The best way to appreciate your job is to imagine yourself without one.
67. Donald M. Kendall: The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.
68. Albert Einstein: Three Rules of Work: Out of clutter find simplicity; From discord find harmony; In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity.
69. Saint Augustine: Pray as though everything depended on God. Work as though everything depended on you.
70. Alexander Graham Bell: Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.
71. Albert Camus: Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
72. Colleen C. Barrett: Work is either fun or drudgery. It depends on your attitude. I like fun.

Finding Success

Get advice and insight into finding success in your life from these quotes.

73. Albert Einstein: Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
74. Beverly Sills: There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
75. Arnold H. Glasow: Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.
76. Roger Babson: Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.
77. Ralph Waldo Emerson: Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.
78. Henry Ford: The man who will use his skill and constructive imagination to see how much he can give for a dollar, instead of how little he can give for a dollar, is bound to succeed.
79. Anatole France: To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe.
80. Winston Churchill: Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.
81. Benjamin Disraeli: The secret of success is constancy of purpose.
82. Brian Tracy: All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.

On Opportunity

Learn to make the most of your opportunities from these quotes.

83. Francis Bacon: A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.
84. Milton Berle: If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.
85. Walt Disney: All our dreams come true if we have the courage to pursue them.
86. George Bernard Shaw: Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not.
87. Maya Angelou: The horizon leans forward, offering you space to place new steps of change.
88. George S. Patton: Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.
89. William B. Sprague: Do not wait to strike till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.
90. George Bernard Shaw: The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can’t find them, make them.
91. William Jennings Bryan: Destiny is not a matter of chance. It is a matter of choice: it is not to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.
92. William Matthews: Unless a man has trained himself for his chance, the chance will only make him ridiculous.

Growing Up

Gain valuable lessons on what it means to grow up from these quotes.

93. Judy Garland: Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.
94. DeSeaux: The important thing is this: to be able to give up in any given moment all that we are for what we can become.
95. Pearl S. Buck: Growth itself contains the germ of happiness.
96. Thomas Szasz: The self is not something that one finds. It’s something one creates.
97. Abraham Lincoln: You have to do your own growing, no matter how tall your grandfather was.
98. Orlando McGuire: In this day and age, some turn 18 and think they’re a man or a woman and that’s it, but that’s just not true. You have to establish your manhood or your womanhood with actions.
99. Beverly Mitchell: Part of growing up is just taking what you learn from that and moving on and not taking it to heart.
100. Winston Groom: If you’re gonna screw up, do it while you’re young. Older you get, the harder it is to bounce back.