These grad quotes will inspire you. Grad, short for a graduate, one who has graduated from an education program, also known as an alumnus.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging grad quotes, grad sayings, and grad proverbs.
Best Grad Quotes
- “Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.” ~ Bernard Baruch
- “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.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt
- “Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.” ~ Robert Louis Stevenson
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“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.” ~ Robert Orben
- “There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.” ~ Beverly Sills
- “Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated. You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” ~ David Lloyd George
- “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” ~ Judy Garland
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“Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Go for it now. The future is promised to no one.” ~ Wayne Dyer
- “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.” ~ Garry Trudeau , Grad quotes college
- “All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.” ~ Walt Disney
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“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind. Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” ~ Dr. Seuss
- “If you can dream it, you can achieve it.” ~ Zig Ziglar
- “What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” ~ George Saunders
- “Nothing worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde
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“Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” ~ Oscar Wilde
- “Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable.” ~ Wendy Wasserstein
- “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it. If you can dream it, you can become it.” ~ William Arthur Ward
- “If you feel that you have both feet planted on level ground, then the university has failed you.” ~ Robert F. Goheen , Grad quotes university
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“Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” ~ Nelson Mandela
- “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” ~ Milton Berle
- “If you can dream it, you can do it.” ~ Walt Disney
- “Living well is the best revenge. If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” ~ Max Eastman
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“Always be a first-rate version of yourself.” ~ Audrey Hepburn
- “You can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps.” ~ David Lloyd George
- “The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate.” ~ Doug Larson
- “Name it… and if you can dream it… you can achieve it.” ~ Wayne Dyer
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“If you can dream it, you can make it so.” ~ Belva Davis
- “I wish I had the luxury of time to read and write like grad students do. That sounds pretty awesome. When I was writing my first book one of my friends was going to grad school at the same time and I heard a lot of stories about drinking, too. I feel like everyone was having affairs.” ~ Jami Attenberg
- “Still, accomplishment is unreliable. “Succeeding,” whatever that might mean to you, is hard, and the need to do so constantly renews itself (success is like a mountain that keeps growing ahead of you as you hike it), and there’s the very real danger that “succeeding” will take up your whole life, while the big questions go untended.” ~ George Saunders
- “And so, a prediction and my heartfelt wish for you: as you get older, your self will diminish and you will grow in love. YOU will gradually be replaced by LOVE. If you have kids, that will be a huge moment in your process of self-diminishment. You really won’t care what happens to YOU, as long as they benefit. That’s one reason your parents are so proud and happy today. One of their fondest dreams has come true: you have accomplished something difficult and tangible that has enlarged you as a person and will make your life better, from here on in, forever.” ~ George Saunders
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“This made him a grad student, and grad students existed not to learn things but to relieve the tenured faculty members of tiresome burdens such as educating people and doing research.” ~ Neal Stephenson
- “Now, we don’t really believe these things – intellectually we know better – but we believe them viscerally, and live by them, and they cause us to prioritize our own needs over the needs of others, even though what we really want, in our hearts, is to be less selfish, more aware of what’s actually happening in the present moment, more open, and more loving.” ~ George Saunders
- “Each of us is born with a series of built-in confusions that are probably somehow Darwinian. These are: (1) we’re central to the universe (that is, our personal story is the main and most interesting story, the only story, really); (2) we’re separate from the universe (there’s US and then, out there, all that other junk – dogs and swing-sets, and the State of Nebraska and low-hanging clouds and, you know, other people), and (3) we’re permanent (death is real, o.k., sure – for you, but not for me).” ~ George Saunders
- “I feel like no matter what happens in my career endeavors after today, going to grad school is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made.” ~ Gene Weingarten
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“My brand is good storytelling. I really want [my company] Hillman Grad Productions to be associated with great stories, interesting characters; things that are three-dimensional and feel honest.” ~ Lena Waithe
- “And then, one acting class turned into two, turned into four, and then turned into, “I love this. I could do this for the rest of my life. But, I don’t have a background in acting. I never acted in college or did anything like that. How can I go about doing this?” That meant going to grad school and getting some training, and I did. I literally walked down the path. It was real fortuitous for me to walk by that school, that one morning.” ~ Tim Kang
- “The most fun thing about doing the show is that, as a nerd, the fun has been in learning and having it be like a grad school for me, every day. Every moment is a new experience. Every conversation is a new gain.” ~ Steven Yeun
- “As long as I’m dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideas, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me.” ~ N.D. Wilson
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“I was trying to release emotions, exercise emotions, and then I entered the art world. Even after grad school, some of [the earlier works] were still lingering in my head. I realized there were some pieces where I felt that I had to respond to the criticism.” ~ Kalup Linzy
- “I always wanted to live in L.A. The other thing that always inspired me was movies; that’s why I’m here. I always wanted to be a part of the movie business and make movies. That’s why I went to AFI grad school for filmmaking.” ~ Jeff Vespa
- “I think we’d all hate to be the one who gets declared undateable by one’s entire grad-school population based on a couple of told and retold stories.” ~ Carolyn Hax
- “I spent many years in grad school in English, so I’ve read a lot in a variety of genres. But adventure fantasy is my bread and butter as a reader, and probably always will be. So it’s only natural that I came to that genre as a writer.” ~ Saladin Ahmed
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“Out of grad school, I worked as a tech writer for a while before going into computer coding for a living.” ~ Richard Powers
- “Hire inexperience. This year we plan to hire 200 engineers – half of whom are recent grads. Young people are not burdened by years of experience. They haven’t learned – or been told – what is right or wrong. With engineering, there is no tried and tested path. You try, and fail, and fix, and fail again.” ~ James Dyson
- “There is this thing called Actors Access, which is run by the breakdown services. What they do is they put up casting notices that are available to everyone. Because there’s thousands and thousands of actors and there are student films and grad student films and, sometimes, some small independent projects that are on there.” ~ Bostin Christopher
- “I remember getting out of grad school and coming to New York and not wanting to get a teaching job because I wanted to work on my own, to develop my own ideas. There isn’t that time now. Artists are exhibiting while they are still in grad school. There isn’t that safety cushion.” ~ Brice Marden
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“You know what I’m great at? Trivial Pursuit. What good is that gonna do you in life? It has the word ‘trivial’ in the name. The game is basically telling you that you pursue trivial things. Trivial – as in not important. Trivial – as in maybe you should’ve gone to grad school.” ~ Christian Finnegan
- “Other people do better going on to grad school and others yet are naturally inclined and do just fine without any formal training at all. Everyone is different. The only things I think are imperative are focus, determination and hard work.” ~ Toks Olagundoye
- “I thought clarity of communication was the most important thing in writing, and if you really cared about getting your idea across, you would say it in the most straightforward way possible. Later, in college and grad school, I came to realize that language is a technology like any other, and that it’s always evolving – clarity of expression is always evolving.” ~ Elif Batuman
- “In grad school, a friend and I gave ourselves the task of writing poems in the voice of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga after they did the collaboration for “Telephone.” I just kind of kept going. That was quite a while ago – Beyoncé meant something very different then than she does now.” ~ Morgan Parker
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“The Thanksgiving meal should not be treated as a grad school exam or an Olympic dive. Whatever you cook will be good enough – unless you make that Twinkie turkey stuffing we’re suddenly hearing too much about.” ~ Mary Schmich
- “I started treating my career as if it was a guarantee, if things get difficult and things don’t work out, I’m not gonna think I have a Plan B, which is grad school, or Plan C, which is an office job. I’m just gonna have a Plan A, a Plan A 2.0, a Plan A 3.0, and that’s what I’m going to do. Because entertainment and YouTube are always going to be my Plan A.” ~ Lilly Singh
- “The plain fact is that recent college grads aren’t in massive pain. They suffered during the Great Recession like everyone else, but all told, they probably suffered a little less than most other groups.” ~ Kevin Drum
- “Humor can be a great way to lift spirits and relate with soon-to-be high school grads. Whether you’re in need of a funny senior year quote for a card, your yearbook, or a gift, you can use this list of funny graduation quotes by famous leaders and comedians to get inspired. To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say well done. And to the C students, I say you too may one day be president of the United States.” ~ George W. Bush , Grad quotes high school
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“I got into [acting] so late because of sports. And then when I was in grad school, I sort of got lulled into basically forgetting I was black, in – meaning that everyone you play at a conservatory, 95 percent of the characters are non-black.” ~ Mahershala Ali
- “I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn’t write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.” ~ Harry Turtledove
- “There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an “inward-facing” community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th-century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we’re going to build this little garden of innocence.” ~ Christine Jennings
- “I thought that I wasn’t an essayist because I just didn’t see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That’s why I joined the poetry program in grad school.” ~ John D’Agata
- “And Lopate’s anthology helped a lot too. It came out the same year I started grad school, and I remember the book’s publication feeling eventful and celebratory. It got a ton of attention for giving voice to this form that had sort of slipped between the cracks. That was exciting to see.” ~ John D’Agata
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“As frustrating as my time in grad school felt, it also helped tremendously because it challenged me to figure out what it was I thought I wanted.” ~ John D’Agata
- “I felt a little lost as a student. At Iowa, I felt as if I had gotten into this program that was going to save me, and so I moved myself across the country for grad school and yet still didn’t have a home. It was upsetting. And I know that’s a common feeling.” ~ John D’Agata
- “There was an Israeli artist who was in grad school with me. I remember trying to get to know him on a more personal level. He had moved to the Fairfax area, not realizing that it’s a super Jewish part of L.A. He told me, I don’t understand why American Jews feel this connection with me. I was embarrassed because I was feeling that connection with him, too!” ~ Jill Soloway
- “In this knowledge-worker age, it’s now increasingly tied to doing well in school so you can get into better grad schools so you can get better jobs – so the pressure to do well is really high.” ~ Stephen Covey
- “I think that relations between professors and grad students can be messy and not entirely bondable. Part of the problem is that those boundaries become eroticized. I don’t think people are quite so managerial with their sexuality. By suggesting that sex can be successfully regulated, we’re imposing stupidity on the issue.” ~ Laura Kipnis
