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

 

The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each one of you is a fuse.   —Edward Koch

 

Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents. They come home as contemporaries. After twenty-two years of child-raising, they are unemployed.

—Erma Bombeck

 

The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.

—Aristotle

 

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

 

People will frighten you about a graduation.... They use words you don’t hear often: “And we wish you Godspeed.” It is a warning, Godspeed. It means you are no longer welcome here at these prices.

                                  —Bill Cosby

 

Education is what survives when what has been learned has been forgotten.

—B.F. Skinner

 

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.           —Sydney Harris

 

The trouble with learning from experience is that you never graduate. —Doug Larson

 

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.                 —Oscar Wilde

 

Of course there’s a lot of knowledge in universities: the freshmen bring a little in; the seniors don’t take much away, so knowledge sort of accumulates.

—A. Lawrence Lowell

 

Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.

—Winston Churchill

 

How many cares one loses when one decides not to be something but to be someone.

—Coco Chanel

 

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

—e.e. cummings