Graduation

If all you ever do is all you've ever done, then all you'll ever get is all you've ever got.

The only way to do great work is to love what you do.

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.

Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

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.

The most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

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. That is real freedom.

The story of your lives will be the story of your struggle to be true to the ideas you believe in.

Human rights, security, and development, taken together, make up the idea of 'larger freedom.' A young man who has HIV, who cannot read or write, and who lives on the brink of starvation is not truly free — even if he can vote to choose his rulers.

Do not think you can look away from the injustice, the suffering, or the lack of true freedom that is the lot of so many people in our world today. Your future depends on their future.