You’re now a senior, you’ve come so far and have overcome the challenges that tested your acquired knowledge and skills throughout the years. So for the exciting ending that leads to a new beginning, here are 140 inspirational senior quotes.
Inspirational Senior Quotes
1. Go for it now. The future is promised to no one. – Wayne Dyer
2. You cannot help but learn more as you take the world into your hands. Take it up reverently, for it is an old piece of clay, with millions of thumbprints on it. – John Updike
3. All our dreams can come true…if we have the courage to pursue them. – Walt Disney
4. Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant. – Robert Louis Stevenson
5. The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. – Eleanor Roosevelt
6. What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
7. Wherever you go, go with all your heart. – Confucius
8. Things turn out best for the people who make the best out of the way things turn out. – Art Linkletter
9. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest. – Benjamin Franklin
10. Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire. – Arnold H. Glasgow
11. The larger the island of knowledge, the longer the shoreline of wonder. – Ralph W. Sockman
12. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows. – Sydney J. Harris
13. All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose. – Brian Tracy
14. Time is not measured by the passing of years but by what one does, what one feels, and what one achieves. – Jawaharlal Nehru
15. To accomplish great things, we must not only act, but also dream; not only plan, but also believe. – Anatole France
16. Patience, persistence and perspiration make an unbeatable combination for success. – Napoleon Hill
17. Don’t be afraid to take a big step if one is indicated; you can’t cross a chasm in two small jumps. – David Lloyd George
18. Go confidently in the direction of your dreams. Live the life you have imagined. – Henry David Thoreau
19. There is nothing more beautiful than finding your course as you believe you bob aimlessly in the current. Wouldn’t you know that your path was there all along, waiting for you to knock, waiting for you to become. This path does not belong to your parents, your teachers, your leaders, or your lovers. Your path is your character defining itself more and more everyday like a photograph coming into focus. – Jodie Foster
20. Graduation is not the end; it’s the beginning. – Senator Orrin Hatch
21. Education is not preparation for life; education is life itself. – John Dewey
22. There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. – C.S. Lewis
23. Your life is your story, and the adventure ahead of you is the journey to fulfill your own purpose and potential. – Kerry Washington
24. The fireworks begin today. Each diploma is a lighted match. Each one of you is a fuse. – Edward Koch
25. Take pride in how far you’ve come. Have faith in how far you can go. But don’t forget to enjoy the journey. – Michael Josephson
26. The only thing you can do in this life is pursue your passions, celebrate your bloopers and never stop following your fear. – Grace Helbig
27. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. – Mark Twain
28. Real courage is holding on to a still voice in your head that says, ‘I must keep going.’ It’s that voice that says nothing is a failure if it is not final. That voice that says to you, ‘Get out of bed. Keep going. I will not quit.’ – Cory Booker
29. When you leave here, don’t forget why you came. – Adlai E. Stevenson
30. So, I say to you, forget about the fast lane. If you really want to fly, just harness your power to your passion. Honor your calling. Everybody has one. Trust your heart and success will come to you. – Oprah Winfrey
31. The most rewarding things in life are often the ones that look like they cannot be done. – Arnold Palmer
32. In response to those who say to stop dreaming and face reality, I say keep dreaming and make reality. – Kristian Kan
33. You have to dance a little bit before you step out into the world each day, because it changes the way you walk. – Sandra Bullock
34. I encourage you to live with life. Be courageous, adventurous. Give us a tomorrow, more than we deserve. – Maya Angelou
35. In this life we cannot do great things. We can only do small things with great love. – Mother Teresa
36. If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it. – William Arthur Ward
37. You can never be overdressed or overeducated. – Oscar Wilde
38. You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself in any direction you choose. – Dr. Seuss
39. The only impossible journey is the one you never begin. – Anthony Robbins
40. Life is what we make it, always has been, always will be. – Grandma Moses
41. Be bold, be courageous, be your best. – Gabrielle Giffords
42. There is no script. Live your life. Soak it all in. – Dick Costolo
43. We know what we are, but know not what we may be. – Shakespeare
44. The tassel’s worth the hassle. – Anonymous
45. Believe and act is if it were impossible to fail. – Charles Kettering
46. Spread joy. Chase your wildest dreams. – Patch Adams
47. Dream big and dare to fail. – Norman Vaughan
48. I go to seek a Great Perhaps. – Francois Rabelais
49. You can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets. – Arnold Schwarzenegger
50. When one door closes, another opens; but we often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door that we do not see the one which has opened for us. – Alexander Graham Bell
51. Graduation is only a concept. In real life every day you graduate. Graduation is a process that goes on until the last day of your life. If you can grasp that, you’ll make a difference. – Arie Pencovici
52. Knowledge is not power. The implementation of knowledge is power. – Larry Winget
53. Learning is the only thing the mind never exhausts, never fears, and never regrets. – Leonardo da Vinci
54. Let us never be betrayed into saying we have finished our education; because that would mean we had stopped growing. – Julia H. Gulliver
55. Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishment. – Jim Rohn
56. Life is an improvisation. You have no idea what’s going to happen next and you are mostly just making things up as you go along. – Stephen Colbert
57. Keep in mind that neither success nor failure is ever final. – Roger Babson
58. I hope your dreams take you to the corners of your smiles, to the highest of your hopes, to the windows of your opportunities, and to the most special places your heart has ever known. – Unknown
59. Set out each day believing in your dreams. Know without a doubt that you were made for great things. – Josh Hinds
60. You must continue to dream the wild dream that you dreamed when you were young. – Mike Tomlin
61. “For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “Plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” – Jeremiah 29:11
62. God never said that the journey would be easy, but He did say that the arrival would be worthwhile. – Max Lucado
63. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me. – Philippians 4:13
64. Commit to the Lord whatever you do, and your plans will succeed. – Proverbs 16:3
65. She turned her can’ts into cans and her dreams into plans. – Kobi Yamada
66. Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. – Bobby Kennedy
67. Nobody likes to fail, but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game. – Ben Bernanke
68. Follow your arrow, wherever it points. – Kacey Musgraves
69. If you’re willing to stand for what you believe in . . . you won’t need advice from me, because you will be able to handle whatever comes. – Whoopi Goldberg
70. 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
71. Don’t be afraid of fear. Because it sharpens you, it challenges you, it makes you stronger; and when you run away from fear, you also run away from the opportunity to be your best possible self. – Ed Helms
72. My wish for you is that this life becomes all that you want it to. Your dreams stay big, your worries stay small and that you never need to carry more than you can hold. – Rascal Flatts
73. The direction in which education starts a man will determine his future. – Plato
74. The unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective. – Jon Stewart
75. Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world right in the eye. – Helen Keller
76. The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore. – Dale Carnegie
77. We do not need magic to change the world, we can carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. – JK Rowling
78. Be willing to embrace wonder, to experience unexpected discovery, and to go in unknown directions… Never become so enamored of your own smarts that you stop signing up for life’s hard classes. – Melissa Harris-Perry
79. Live all of your life. Understand it, see it, appreciate it. And have fun. – Joss Whedon
80. A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds. – Francis Bacon
81. There are no regrets in life, just lessons. – Jennifer Aniston
82. My favorite animal is the turtle. The reason is that in order for the turtle to move, it has to stick its neck out. There are going to be times in your life when you’re going to have to stick your neck out. There will be challenges and instead of hiding in a shell, you have to go out and meet them. – Ruth Westheimer
83. Take it all one day at a time, and enjoy the journey. – Kristi Bartle
84. Share your sparkle wherever you are. – Dodinsky
85. And when your journey seems too hard, and when you run into a chorus of cynics who tell you that you’re being foolish to keep believing or that you can’t do something, or that you should just give up, or you should just settle—you might say to yourself a little phrase that I’ve found handy these last eight years: Yes, we can. – Barack Obama
86. Now the first suggestion is to aim high, but be aware that even before you have reached your ultimate professional destination, if you always strive for excellence, you can and should have a substantial impact on the world in which you live. – Sandra Day O’Connor
87. Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world. Don’t let anything stand in the way of the light that shines through this form. Risk being seen in all of your glory. – Jim Carrey
88. The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor. – Vince Lombardi
89. Just because you don’t know what you want yet, it doesn’t mean that there’s nothing to want. – Emily Henry
90. Develop and protect a moral sensibility and demonstrate the character to apply it. Dream big. Work hard. Think for yourself. Love everything you love, everyone you love, with all your might. And do so, please, with a sense of urgency, for every tick of the clock subtracts from fewer and fewer. – David McCullough Jr.
91. The road may be rough, the journey may be tough and the experience may be bitter, but they are stepping stones to our future thrones. – Bamigboye Olurotimi
92. You won’t be able to do this ten years from now—just leave everything behind and go. – Rachel Kapelke-Dale
93. Some people graduate on time. some others graduate at the right time. no matter about the time you graduations, you have to take responsibility to finish your college when you choose to start it. not for your parents, not for your friends, but for you. when you graduate, you’ll be at the higher lever than your life before. remember, you don’t have to be smarter, all you have to do is be the work harder than others. – Nunki Artura
94. Everything’s always ending. But everything’s always beginning, too. – Patrick Ness
95. If you graduated from higher education, you should feel proud and not allow your grades to define who you are. Regardless of your cumulative GPA, you will always have opportunities to find a career that suits your skills and interests. – Saaif Alam
96. Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious and compassionate will save your ass. Being curious and compassionate can take you out of your ego and edge your soul towards wonder. – Mary Karr
97. The world is waiting for us to graduate from ourselves. – Shannon L. Alder
98. And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune- all the same, let us never forget how good we all once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too,…perhaps better than we actually are. – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
99. Stand tall on the summit after a tedious climb. Take in the remarkable scenery and the exhilaration of accomplishment. But don’t pause for long; there are greater mountains to climb while you still possess the drive and capacity to do so. – Richelle E. Goodrich
100. Character is a course, finish it. – Mac Canoza
101. Now is the time to make sure we have the strings of all the balloons we want to keep before they all float away. – Maggie Stiefvater
102. Success is the end product. – Lailah Gifty Akita
103. Don’t live down to expectations. Go out there and do something remarkable. – Wendy Wasserstein
104. During my second year of nursing school our professor gave us a quiz. I breezed through the questions until I read the last one: “What is the first name of the woman who cleans the school?” Surely this was a joke. I had seen the cleaning woman several times, but how would I know her name? I handed in my paper, leaving the last question blank. Before the class ended, one student asked if the last question would count toward our grade. “Absolutely,” the professor said. “In your careers, you will meet many people. All are significant. They deserve your attention and care, even if all you do is smile and say hello.” I’ve never forgotten that lesson. I also learned her name was Dorothy. – Joann C. Jones
105. It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are. – E.E. Cummings
106. Put your future in good hands – your own. – Author Unknown
107. Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. – Susan B. Anthony
108. Think big thoughts but relish small pleasures. – H. Jackson Brown
109. Wherever you go, no matter what the weather, always bring your own sunshine. – Anthony J. D’Angelo
110. Do all the other things, the ambitious things— travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes…but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. – George Saunders
111. Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive: easy to govern, but impossible to enslave. – Henry Peter Brougham
112. What we learn with pleasure we never forget. – Alfred Mercier
113. Instruction ends in the schoolroom, but education ends only with life. – Frederick W. Robertson
114. Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead. – Nora Ephron
115. The beautiful thing about learning is that no one can take it away from you. – B.B. King
116. It is absolutely still possible to make a difference. – Michelle Obama
117. From my point of view, which is that of a storyteller, I see your life as already artful, waiting, just waiting and ready for you to make it art. – Toni Morrison
118. Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions. – Albert Einstein
119. Take action. Every story you’ve ever connected with, every leader you’ve ever admired, every puny little thing that you’ve ever accomplished is the result of taking action. You have a choice. You can either be a passive victim of circumstance or you can be the active hero of your own life. – Bradley Withford
120. The most important thing in your life 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
121. The old rules are crumbling and nobody knows what the new rules are. So make up your own rules. – Neil Gaiman
122. God wants us to know that life is a series of beginnings, not endings. Just as graduations are not terminations, but commencements. Creation is an ongoing process, and when we create a perfect world where love and compassion are shared by all, suffering will cease. – Bernie Siegel
123. Last but not least, I would say 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. – Elias Zerhouni
124. If you want something you’ve never had, you must be willing to do something you’ve never done. – Thomas Jefferson
125. It’s harder to build than destroy. To build is to engage and change. In jazz, we call progressing harmonies changes. Changes are like obstacles on a speed course. They demand your attention and require you to be present. They are coming… they are here… and then they are gone. It’s how life comes. Each moment is a procession from the future into the past and the sweet spot is always the present. Live in that sweet spot. Be present. – Wynton Marsalis
126. Get busy living or get busy dying. – Stephen King
127. You have learned a lot, but there is still lots of learning for you as you journey through life. Never stop learning. – Kate Summers
128. You can complain about the direction of your life all you want, but until you sit in the driver’s seat and begin to drive yourself, you aren’t going to get where you want to go! – Les Brown
129. Be the author, not the reader, of your own life. – Paul Gibbons
130. Life is the most exciting opportunity we have. But we have one shot. You graduate from college once, and that’s it. You’re going out of that nest. And you have to find that courage that’s deep, deep, deep in there. Every step of the way. – Andrew Shue
131. Congratulations! You made it! It’s time to celebrate all the hard work that led to this joyful occasion. The road to graduation is a long, steep climb, so take a moment at the summit to be proud of your accomplishments. – Sheryl Sandberg
132. If opportunity doesn’t knock, build a door. – Milton Berle
133. One of the most important lessons of my life forced itself on me at about the time I was graduating from grammar school. It was a lesson that turned into a major principle: You are subject to your environment. Therefore, select the environment that will best develop you toward your desired objective. – W. Clement Stone
134. So many of our dreams at first seem impossible, then they seem improbable, and then, when we summon the will, they soon become inevitable. – Christopher Reeve
135. Happiness is like a butterfly which, when pursued, is always beyond our grasp, but, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you. – Nathaniel Hawthorne
136. Sometimes, the only way to discover who you are or what life you should lead is to do less planning and more living— to burst the double bubble of comfort and convention and just do stuff, even if you don’t know precisely where it’s going to lead, because you don’t know precisely where it’s going to lead. – Daniel Pink
137. To be really great in little things, to be truly noble and heroic in the insipid details of everyday life is a virtue so rare as to be worthy of canonization. – Harriet Beecher Stowe
138. You can never plan the future by the past. – Edmund Burke
139. If you are successful, it is because somewhere, sometime, someone gave you a life or an idea that started you in the right direction. Remember also that you are indebted to life until you help some less fortunate person, just as you were helped. – Melinda Gates
140. The important thing is this: to be able to give up at any given moment all that we are for what we can become. – DeSeaux