This is your time and it feels normal to you, but really there is no normal. There's only change, and resistance to it, and then more change.
speech graduation growth
Meryl Streep
Barnard College Commencement 2010, 2010
Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy — they're given after all. Choices can be hard.
speech graduation empathy
Jeff Bezos
Princeton University Commencement 2010, 2010
A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step by step, choice by choice, and experience by experience.
speech graduation career
Wade Davis
Colorado College Commencement 2010, 2010
The world you see outside of you is a reflection of what you have inside of you.
speech graduation self discovery
Cory Booker
Pitzer College Commencement 2010, 2010
Any successful business reflects the combination of ideas joined with an important expression of love through service to other humans.
speech graduation entrepreneurship
Carl Schramm
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Commencement 2009, 2009
If wise men decline it, others will not; if honest men refuse it, others will not.
speech graduation responsibility
Robert M. Gates
University of Georgia Commencement 2009, 2009
If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren't pessimistic, you don't understand data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and you aren't optimistic, you haven't got a pulse.
speech graduation resilience
Paul Hawken
University of Portland Commencement 2009, 2009
Imagination is cultivated, above all, by courses in the arts and humanities. It is in some ways the most essential of all, if we are to work toward a world in which we see distant lives as spacious and deep.
speech graduation empathy
Martha Nussbaum
Connecticut College Commencement 2009, 2009
The humanities and the arts only do what is much more precious than making money: they make a world that is worth living in.
speech graduation arts
Martha Nussbaum
Connecticut College Commencement 2009, 2009
A new vision of the American dream that says achieving balance in your life is more important than the balance in your checking account.
speech graduation balance
Chris Gardner
UC Berkeley Commencement 2009, 2009
We push ourselves through the week to get to the weekend. We have become 2/7ths people, only really living 2 days out of the 7 in a week. Things can be different. We can become 7/7ths people. And thereby become whole.
speech graduation balance
Jonathan Youshaei
Deerfield High School Commencement 2009, 2009
Failure will teach you things that you can learn no place else. How else will you know yourself or the strength of your friendships until both have been tested by adversity?
speech graduation failure
Jonathan Youshaei
Deerfield High School Commencement 2009, 2009