These graduate student quotes will inspire you. A graduate student is someone who has earned a bachelor’s degree and is pursuing additional education in a specific field.
Below you will find a collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging graduate student quotes, graduate student sayings, and graduate student proverbs.
Best Graduate Student Quotes
- “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.” ~ Will Rogers
- “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
- “Living well is the best revenge.If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” ~ Max Eastman
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“Think of it as your ticket to change the world.” ~ Tom Brokaw
- “If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door.” ~ Milton Berle
- “Never follow anyone else’s path, unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost.” ~ Ellen DeGeneres
- “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
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“Go, and make interesting mistakes, make amazing mistakes, make glorious and fantastic mistakes. Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” ~ Mark Twain
- “If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” ~ Albert Schweitzer
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“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. And you are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” ~ Dr. Seuss
- “Make glorious and fantastic mistakes.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “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
- “You are the guy who’ll decide where to go.” ~ Dr. Seuss
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“There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” ~ C. S. Lewis
- “Break rules. Leave the world more interesting for your being here.” ~ Neil Gaiman
- “Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “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
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“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt
- “Have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” ~ Steve Jobs
- “Those who matter don’t mind, and those who mind don’t matter.” ~ Bernard Baruch
- “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
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“To those of you who received honours, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students, I say, you too can be president of the United States.” ~ George W. Bush
- “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” ~ Winston Churchill
- “You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.” ~ Dr. Seuss
- “All your dreams can come true if you have the courage to pursue them.” ~ Walt Disney
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“My favorite animal is the turtle. The reason is that in order for the turtle to move, it has to stick its neck out.” ~ Ruth Westheimer
- “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’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
- “Just don’t give up trying to do what you really want to do.” ~ Ella Fitzgerald
- “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
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“If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place.” ~ Nora Roberts
- “If you don’t ask, the answer is always no.” ~ Nora Roberts
- “It is wise to keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final.” ~ Roger Babson
- “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” ~ Mahatma Gandhi
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“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 Teresa, Leonardo da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein.” ~ H. Jackson Brown, Jr.
- “A clever graduate student could teach Fourier something new, but
surely no one claims that he could teach Archimedes to reason
better.” ~ Paul Halmos - “I would not say I am looking for God. Or, I am not looking for God precisely. I am not seeking the God I learned about as a Catholic child, as an 18-year-old novice in a religious community, as an agnostic graduate student, as – but who cares about my disguises? Or God’s.” ~ Mary Rose O’Reilley
- “When a professor insists computer science is X but not Y, have compassion for his graduate students.” ~ Alan Perlis
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“I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I’ve never found a better system.” ~ Lawrence Wright
- “I had been offered fellowships to enter as a graduate student at either Harvard or Princeton. But the Princeton fellowship was somewhat more generous, since I had not actually won the Putnam competition… Thus Princeton became the choice for my graduate study location.” ~ John Forbes Nash
- “You are almost not free, if you are teaching a group of graduate students, to become friends with one of them. I don’t mean anything erotically charged, just a friendship.” ~ Marilyn Hacker
- “Things that I can do myself, I either do by myself, or teach a willing undergraduate who doesn’t know how to do those things by doing it for me. Things that I can’t do myself, my graduate students should be doing.” ~ John Maeda
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“I used to tell women graduate students, half-seriously, that the role of slightly rebellious daughter was one of the better roles for women living in patriarchy.” ~ Carol Gilligan
- “If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it.” ~ Nora Roberts
- “I didn’t study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.” ~ Barbara Kingsolver
- “The proper aim of education is to promote significant learning. Significant learning entails development. Development means successively asking broader and deeper questions of the relationship between oneself and the world. This is as true for first graders as graduate students, for fledging artists as graying accountants.” ~ Laurent A. Daloz
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“As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s.” ~ Robert Darnton
- “Surveying the way viruses have been discovered in the past, I came to the conclusion that I could use my technology that I developed as a graduate student – DNA microarray technology – to create a chip that would simultaneously screen for all viruses ever discovered, and furthermore have the built-in capability of discovering new viruses.” ~ Joseph DeRisi
- “There was one thing more than any other that turned this New York, liberal, Jewish, Columbia University graduate student away from modern liberalism: its use of moral equivalence to avoid confronting evil during the Cold War.” ~ Dennis Prager
- “I have graduate students who have developed this ability to love and want to perfect it. Those are the students I spend a lot of time with because at this time they need that.” ~ Frederick Lenz
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“I was once a graduate student in Victorian literature, and I believe as the Victorian novelists did, that a novel isn’t simply a vehicle for private expression, but that it also exists for social examination. I firmly believe this.” ~ Margaret Atwood
- “It is a mistake to think of these men as visionary dreamers, playing around at Philadelphia with abstract conceptions of political theory, pulling a whole scheme of government out of the air like a rabbit out of a hat. True, many of them had read and studied enough about the science of politics to put the average statesman of today to shame. But political science was to them an extremely practical topic of discussion, dealing with the extremely practical business of running a government–not, as today, a branch of higher learning reserved for the use of graduate students.” ~ Fred Rodell
- “Economic analysis is the first principle of Marxism. Professors who were genuine leftists would have challenged the entire economics-driven machinery of American academe the wasteful multidepartmental structure, the divisive pedantry of overspecialization, the cronyism and sycophancy in recruitment and promotion, the boondoggling ostentation of pointless conferences, the exploitation of graduate students and part-time teachers, the subservience of faculty to overpaid administrators, the mediocrity and folly of the ruling cliques of the Modern Language Association.” ~ Camille Paglia
- “I believe that we can still have a genre of scientific books suitable for and accessible alike to professionals and interested laypeople. The concepts of science, in all their richness and ambiguity, can be presented without any compromise, without any simplification counting as distortion, in language accessible to all intelligent people. I hope that this book can be read with profit both in seminars for graduate students and if the movie stinks and you forgot your sleeping pills on the businessman’s special to Tokyo.” ~ Stephen Jay Gould
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“We need to align the incentives so that colleges have an incentive to keep down their costs… to graduate students on time with degrees in areas where they’re going to be able to get jobs and going to be able to pay back those loans.” ~ Elizabeth Warren
- “Science itself is badly in need of integration and unification. The tendency is more and more the other way … Only the graduate student, poor beast of burden that he is, can be expected to know a little of each. As the number of physicists increases, each specialty becomes more self-sustaining and self-contained. Such Balkanization carries physics, and indeed, every science further away, from natural philosophy, which, intellectually, is the meaning and goal of science.” ~ Isidor Isaac Rabi
- “I spent eighteen months as a graduate student in physics at Columbia University, waiting unhappily for an opportunity to work in a laboratory and wondering if I should continue in physics.” ~ Sidney Altman
- “There was a golden period that I look back upon with great regret, in which the cheapest of experimental animals were medical students. Graduate students were even better. In the old days, if you offered a graduate student a thiamine-deficient diet, he gladly went on it, for that was the only way he could eat. Science is getting to be more and more difficult.” ~ George Wald
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“As a graduate student, I wrote a long paper connecting the dots between mathematical models of learning and language development in children. It was published in a major journal.” ~ Steven Pinker
- “When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.” ~ Francis Crick
- “And then there is Pythagoras. The legend is that the founder of theoretical mathematics was so outraged when one of his students, the haplessly gifted Hippasus, discovered irrational numbers that he sent the poor fellow out on a raft to drown, initiating a venerable tradition of professors mistreating their graduate students.” ~ Rebecca Goldstein
- “Almost all of my graduate students say that they got interested in dinosaurs because of ‘Jurassic Park.'” ~ Jack Horner
- “If you believe in what you’re doing, you’ll be successful.” ~ Connie Sellecca
- “American universities are organized on the principle of the nuclear rather than the extended family. Graduate students are grimly trained to be technicians rather than connoisseurs. The old German style of universal scholarship has gone.” ~ Camille Paglia
