Senior Year Quotes: 44 for Graduation & What’s Next

44 Quotes 23 verified to a primary source

Senior year is twelve months of lasts: last first day, last game, last locker slam. The 44 quotes below are picked for that mix of nostalgia and nerves — some funny, some for your yearbook page, some for the graduation cap. They come from commencement speeches, novels, and poems.

Twenty-three are matched to their source, so you can credit the right person in a speech. The rest are marked “attributed.” At the end are four popular graduation lines that are usually credited to the wrong person, including one that is really a 1998 rock song.

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1

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Steve Jobs Verified source
2

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

Steve Jobs Verified source
3

There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, 'Morning, boys. How's the water?'

David Foster Wallace Attributed — source not confirmed
4

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all.

J.K. Rowling Attributed — source not confirmed
5

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 Verified source
6

There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you.

J.K. Rowling Attributed — source not confirmed
7

It is the hard days--the times that challenge you to your very core--that will determine who you are.

Sheryl Sandberg Attributed — source not confirmed
8

Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined.

Henry David Thoreau Verified source
9

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

Eleanor Roosevelt Attributed — source not confirmed
10

If you get, give. If you learn, teach.

Maya Angelou Attributed — source not confirmed
11

Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary.

Tom Schulman Verified source
12

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Verified source
13

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Verified source
14

I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.

Henry David Thoreau Verified source
15

One day, you will be old enough to start reading fairytales again.

C.S. Lewis Verified source
16

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 Verified source
17

Vulnerability is not winning or losing; it's having the courage to show up and be seen when we have no control over the outcome.

Brené Brown Attributed — source not confirmed
18

Owning our story can be hard but not nearly as difficult as spending our lives running from it.

Brené Brown Attributed — source not confirmed
19

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.

Nelson Mandela Verified source
20

Let us remember: One book, one pen, one child, and one teacher can change the world.

Malala Yousafzai Verified source
21

Let us make our future now, and let us make our dreams tomorrow's reality.

Malala Yousafzai Attributed — source not confirmed
22

Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.

Frederick Douglass Attributed — source not confirmed
23

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost Verified source
24

Why not you?

Mindy Kaling Attributed — source not confirmed
25

Success is to live your life with integrity and to not give in to peer pressure to try to be something that you're not.

Ellen DeGeneres Attributed — source not confirmed
26

And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.

Stephen Chbosky Verified source
27

None has begun to think how divine he himself is and how certain the future is.

Walt Whitman Verified source
28

I am not throwing away my shot.

Lin-Manuel Miranda Attributed — source not confirmed
29

History is entirely created by the person who tells the story.

Lin-Manuel Miranda Attributed — source not confirmed
30

She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged.

Virginia Woolf Attributed — source not confirmed
31

No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.

Virginia Woolf Verified source
32

I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what.

Harper Lee Verified source
33

It is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique.

Conan O'Brien Attributed — source not confirmed
34

If you work really hard and you're kind, amazing things will happen.

Conan O'Brien Verified source
35

And there is no greater cliché in a commencement address than 'follow your dream.' Well I am here to tell you that whatever you think your dream is now, it will probably change. And that's okay.

Conan O'Brien Attributed — source not confirmed
36

Hold fast to dreams, for if dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird that cannot fly.

Langston Hughes Verified source
37

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?

Margaret Atwood Attributed — source not confirmed
38

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.

Albert Einstein Verified source
39

It is nothing short of a miracle that modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry.

Albert Einstein Verified source
40

The world breaks every one and afterward many are strong at the broken places.

Ernest Hemingway Verified source
41

I can't stand it to think my life is going so fast and I'm not really living it.

Ernest Hemingway Attributed — source not confirmed
42

And I have accepted fear as part of life – specifically the fear of change... I have gone ahead despite the pounding in the heart that says: turn back.

Erica Jong Attributed — source not confirmed
43

And the trouble is, if you don't risk anything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong Verified source
44

One of the signs of passing youth is the birth of a sense of fellowship with other human beings as we take our place among them.

Virginia Woolf Attributed — source not confirmed

Popular graduation quotes with the wrong name on them

These circulate under the name above, but the record points elsewhere. Here is where each one actually comes from.

  • Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

    Usually credited to Seneca

    Actually: A lyric from "Closing Time" (1998) by the band Semisonic, written by Dan Wilson. The Seneca credit is an internet invention.

    Research: en.wikipedia.org

  • I've never let my school interfere with my education.

    Usually credited to Mark Twain

    Actually: Not Mark Twain. The idea comes from novelist Grant Allen, who wrote in 1894 of letting "our boys' schooling interfere with their education"; it was first credited to Twain in 1907.

    Research: quoteinvestigator.com

  • It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.

    Usually credited to Frederick Douglass

    Actually: Not found in any of Frederick Douglass's speeches or writings; Douglass scholars regard it as apocryphal. Its origin is unknown.

    Research: checkyourfact.com

  • Education is that which remains, if one has forgotten everything he learned in school.

    Usually credited to Albert Einstein

    Actually: Einstein did write it, in "On Education" (1936), but he credited the line to an unnamed "wit." French versions predate him (Georges Duhamel, 1912).

    Research: en.wikiquote.org

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