Quotes · Skopia

24 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Genre·Commencement address✕clear

Speech · Commencement address

You don't ever have to do anything sensational for people to love you.

2002

★ 7.0

Speech · Commencement address

Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

2005

★ 6.9

Speech · Commencement address

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.

2002

★ 6.9

Speech · Commencement address

A society based on the letter of the law and never reaching any higher fails to take advantage of the full range of human possibilities. The letter of the law is too cold and formal to have a beneficial influence on society. Whenever the tissue of life is woven of legalistic relationships, this creates an atmosphere of spiritual mediocrity that paralyzes man’s noblest impulses.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

1978

★ 6.0

Speech · Commencement address

It's not the honors and the prizes and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It's the knowing that we can be trusted, that we never have to fear the truth, that the bedrock of our lives, from which we make our choices, is very good stuff.

2002

★ 5.2

Speech · Commencement address

The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty, unsexy ways, every day.

David Foster Wallace

2005

★ 5.2

Speech · Commencement address

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

1974

★ 4.6

Speech · Commencement address

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.

2005

★ 3.8

Speech · Commencement address

The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master.

David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon College commencement address · 2005

★ 3.7

Speech · Commencement address

Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe.

David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon College commencement address · 2005

★ 3.6

Speech · Commencement address

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years go on.

2005

★ 3.6

Speech · Commencement address

You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something…because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart even when it leads you off the well worn path and that will make all the difference.

2005

★ 3.6

Speech · Commencement address

But it’s a resilient place, the world, and its beauty is still astonishing, and as for the mess we’ve made, you can change it, and I believe you’re going to.

2015

★ 3.6

Speech · Commencement address

The purpose of art is the lifelong construction of a state of wonder.

1982

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

Somewhere out in this audience may even be someone who will one day follow in my footsteps, and preside over the White House as the President's spouse. I wish him well!

1990

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

David Foster Wallace

2005 Kenyon College commencement address · 2005

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

Err in the direction of kindness.

George Saunders

2013

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

I wish people could realize all their dreams and wealth and fame so that they could see that it’s not where you’re going to find your sense of completion.

2014

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

It did not take atomic weapons to make man want peace, a peace that would last. But the atomic bomb was the turn of the screw. It has made the prospect of future war unendurable.

J. Robert Oppenheimer

1946

★ 3.5

Speech · Commencement address

Above all, be the heroine in your life, not the victim.

1996 Wellesley commencement address · 1996

★ 1.9

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