“Now the commencement speakers will typically also wish you good luck and extend good wishes to you. I will not do that, and I’ll tell you why. From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to know the value of justice. I hope that you will suffer…”— John Roberts, time.com
“For the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie—deliberate, contrived, and dishonest—but the myth—persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Too often we hold fast to the cliches of our forebears. We subject all facts to a prefabricated set of interpretations. We enjoy the comfort of opinio…”— John F. Kennedy, presidency.ucsb.edu
“Life is sometimes hard. Things go wrong, in life and in love and in business and in friendship and in health and in all the other ways that life can go wrong. And when things get tough, this is what you should do.Make good art.I'm serious. Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crush…”— Neil Gaiman, uarts.edu
“Being smart is not enough to achieve results. Plenty of smart people get beaten by others who are more hungry, take calculated risks, work harder, have better people skills, can execute better, or have more common sense. Recognize what you need in that total package to succeed.”— David Cote, unh.edu
“When you have trouble making up your mind about something, tell yourself you’ll settle it by flipping a coin. But don’t go by how the coin flips; go by your emotional reaction to the coin flip. Are you happy or sad it came up heads or tails?”— David Brooks, graduationwisdom.com
“It’s not what happens to you. It’s what you do with what happens to you.”— Chris Waddell, middlebury.edu
“I do not wish you an easy path, because—trust me—you would be oh-so-quickly bored by that. You’d like it today and hate it tomorrow. Instead, I wish you a path filled with impediment and ambiguity and struggle and joy. With plenty of time to be alone, and then plenty of time to be with others, where…”— Julia Keller, scribd.com
“Do not give into this world and let the world set your measure of what is great; let the world set your standards. You have genius, you have greatness, you have glory, you have power inside of you that must be unleashed into the community. Do not settle. Do not yield. You have a truth that must be t…”— Cory Booker, graduationwisdom.com
“Creativity is not something you are, it’s something you do. You have to work at it. The mundane aspects of life will creep up on you constantly, whether they’re the pressures of work or the distractions of American Idol and Facebook. You’ve spent years in this program building great strengths in cre…”— Tom Brinck, graduationwisdom.com
“There's a story about going to a class of young children and asking these young kids, "Who can write an opera? A symphony? Be a high ranking leader, a politician, an astronaut, a doctor, a president?"And what happens? The whole class, they put their hands up because they don't know what can't be don…”— Robert Rodriguez, graduationwisdom.com
“Remember, true opportunity never knocks. I have found that I have to go looking for opportunity – and if I don’t find it, I have to create it.”— Sumner Redstone, graduationwisdom.com
“I have learned to go fully in the face of my dreams. I would recommend you do the same. Now is the time in your life to be selfish. To explore. To take chances. Remember being selfish is not the same as being self-indulgent. You have the gift of time. Use it to do what you love. Believe anything is…”— Julianna Margulies, graduationwisdom.com
“You should have big dreams, full dreams, not half dreams. You know, it's very simple. You can't put a large box in a small box. Well, you cannot put a full life in a small dream box. What you need is to have a box, a dream box, in a life that is as full as the potential you have today.”— Elias A. Zerhouni, news.mit.edu
“The reason you came to college is you didn't know very much. Now you know a little more. But the challenge is to keep building on it. So try something completely different - I don't care, learn something trivial. Learn it well. Sing karaoke, if you dare. Learn to fix something in the house. Help out…”— Tony Snow, publicaffairs.cua.edu
“But I will tell you something very simple and obvious, which is that it is likely that human beings will find fulfillment and will be rewarded for the same qualities that they have been rewarded for for 5,000 years. And that is intelligence, hard work, honesty, a sense of character, loyalty to famil…”— Fareed Zakaria, bates.edu
“Don’t spend so much time trying to choose the perfect opportunity, that you miss the right opportunity. Recognize that there will be failures, and acknowledge that there will be obstacles. But you will learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others, for there is very little learning in success.”— Michael Dell, graduationwisdom.com
“Create an entourage of heroes. Put their pictures on your wall, and keep them in your mind.”— David Brooks, wfu.edu
“I had to be true to myself, as hard as that was and as scary as that was, you’ve got to listen to the voice in your gut. It is individual. It is unique. It is yours. It’s called being authentic. There’s only one of you and maybe you’re not going to follow the path that other people would like to put…”— Meredith Vieira, graduationwisdom.com
“Integrate what you believe into every single area of your life. Take your heart to work, and ask the most and best of everybody else too. Don’t let your special character and values, the secret that you know and no one else does, the truth – don’t let that get swallowed up by the great chewing compl…”— Meryl Streep, graduationwisdom.com