Starting Your New Life: Inspiring Words from Commencement Speeches

You need to arrive early, stay late, you need to make yourself indispensable--you should also probably get rid of those facebook photos of you passed out on bourbon street. —Anderson Cooper

Do what you really love to do and if you don’t know quite what that is yet, well, keep searching, because if you find it, you’ll bring that something extra to your work that will help ensure you will not be automated or outsourced. It will help make you an untouchable radiologist, an untouchable engineer, or an untouchable teacher. —Thomas L. Friedman

Go make your big beautiful dent, and as you do so come down on the side of boldness. If you err, may it be for too much audacity, and not too little. —Sue Monk Kidd

Life is just a big extended improvisation. Embrace the ever changing, ever evolving world with the best rule I’ve ever found. Say “YES AND.” —Jane Lynch

You will lose. You will embarrass yourself. You will suck at something. There is no doubt about it. That’s probably not a traditional message for a graduation ceremony but hey, I’m telling you, embrace it because it’s inevitable. —Denzel Washington

You will have failures in your life, but it is what you do during those valleys that will determine the heights of your peaks. —Rahm Emanuel

If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you'll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead. —Bill Watterson

The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality. —Conan O’Brien

Success is not like rain that falls from the sky equally upon everyone. Success is what you reap when you sow with passion and optimism. —Ahmed H. Zewail

It is the ultimate luxury to combine passion and contribution. It’s also a very clear path to happiness. —Sheryl Sandberg

It takes only one strike to transform a prospector into a gold miner, only one “Yes” to turn a proposal into a marriage. —Chris Matthews

You can be as earnest and ridiculous as you need to be, if you don’t attempt it in isolation. The ridiculously earnest are known to travel in groups. And they are known to change the world. —Barbara Kingsolver

Every man and every woman on this earth is born to lead. A leader's greatest obligation is to make possible an environment where people's minds and hearts can be inventive, brave, human and strong, where people can aspire to do useful and significant things, where people can aspire to change the world. —Carly Fiorina

that's what building a body of work is all about--it's about the daily labor, the many individual acts, the choices large and small that add up over time, over a lifetime, to a lasting legacy. —Barack Obama

We are a nation of accomplishment, and this ceremony is a great testament to that. But the unspoken requirement of a commencement is that you now must commence. —Michael Dell

So from the wise old pinnacle of my 49 years, I want to tell you that what you’re looking for is already inside you. You’ve heard this before, but the holy thing inside you really is that which causes you to seek it. You can’t buy it, lease it, rent it, date it or apply for it. —Anne Lamont

Despite difficulties, always keep optimism. ‘I can overcome these difficulties.’ That mental attitude itself will bring inner strength and self-confidence. —Dalai Lama

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not. —Fred Rogers

You will find on your diplomas, and my diploma, the motto of the University of Pennsylvania, which in Latin reads: “Leges sine moribusvanae.” “Laws without morals are useless.” I would add that morals without commitment are empty. —Jodie Foster

I am about to make my own ancestral guess as to what life is all about, and what young people should do with it. I will again issue the caveat that I am as full of baloney as anybody, and that anybody who says for sure what life is all about might as well lecture on Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, and Tooth Fairies, as well. —Kurt Vonnegut