Craig County Library Corner
Graduation Day is a momentous occasion for most college students. It’s a time for reflection, a cause for celebration, and of course, an opportunity to soak in words of wisdom
from family, friends and A-list celebrities. Each year, numerous movie stars, late-night hosts, politicians, authors and tech entrepreneurs lend their voices to university commencement speeches around the country, helping to set the tone for that year’s graduates.
Some commencement speeches, such as David Foster Wallace’s famous 2005 “This Is Water” address at Kenyon College, have been memorialized in the form of a published book; others, such as former First Lady Michelle Obama’s 2015 speech at Tuskegee University, have been looked to as a marker of the times. And still others, such as Steve Jobs’ 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, are admired as a standard bearer for their poignant emotional core years after the fact.
What binds all these memorable speeches together is their distinct messages, delivered with a personal anecdote or two, and a dash of humor to keep things light. Those messages have ranged from telling grads to brace for uncertainty, to do what they’re most passionate about, or, in the case of Oprah Winfrey’s 2013 Harvard University speech, to keep going in the face of adversity. “There is no such thing as failure,” she said at the time. “Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
Here, we’ve rounded up some of the most famous commencement speeches of all time, which have messages just as inspirational to long-graduated adults today as they were to their young audiences then.
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Steve Jobs at Stanford, 2005
“You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. 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. 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 roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.”
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David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, 2005
“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
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Amy Poehler at Harvard University, 2011
“All I can tell you today is what I have learned. What I have discovered as a person in this world. And that is this: you can’t do it alone. As you navigate through the rest of your life, be open to collaboration. Other people and other people’s ideas are often better than your own. Find a group of people who challenge and inspire you, spend a lot of time with them, and it will change your life. No one is here today because they did it on their own. Okay, maybe Josh, but he’s just a straight-up weirdo.”
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Michelle Obama at Tuskegee University, 2015
“And at the end of the day, by staying true to the me I’ve always known, I found that this journey has been incredibly freeing. Because no matter what happened, I had the peace of mind of knowing that all of the chatter, the name calling, the doubting — all of it was just noise. It did not define me. It didn’t change who I was. And most importantly, it couldn’t hold me back. I have learned that as long as I hold fast to my beliefs and values — and follow my own moral compass — then the only expectations I need to live up to are my own.”
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Robert De Niro at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, 2015
“You discovered a talent, recognized your ambition and developed a passion. When you feel that you can’t fight it, you just go with it. When it comes to the arts, passion should always trump common sense. You aren’t just following dreams, you’re reaching for your destiny. You’re a dancer, a singer, a choreographer, a musician, a filmmaker, a writer, a photographer, a director, a producer, an actor, an artist.”
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Conan O’Brien at Dartmouth College, 2011
“There are few things more liberating in this life than having your worst fear realized. Today I tell you that whether you fear it or not, disappointment will come. The beauty is that through disappointment you can gain clarity, and with clarity comes conviction and true originality … Work hard, be kind, and amazing things will happen.”
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Barack Obama at Howard University, 2016
“There will be times when you shouldn’t compromise your core values, your integrity, and you will have the responsibility to speak up in the face of injustice. But listen. Engage. If the other side has a point, learn from them. If they’re wrong, rebut them. Teach them. Beat them on the battlefield of ideas. And you might as well start practicing now, because one thing I can guarantee you — you will have to deal with ignorance, hatred, racism, foolishness, trifling folks. I promise you, you will have to deal with all that at every stage of your life. That may not seem fair, but life has never been completely fair. Nobody promised you a crystal stair. And if you want to make life fair, then you’ve got to start with the world as it is.”
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John F. Kennedy at American University, 1963
“First, examine our attitude toward peace itself. Too many of us think it is impossible. Too many think it is unreal. But that is a dangerous, defeatist belief. It leads to the conclusion that war is inevitable, that mankind is doomed, that we are gripped by forces we cannot control. We need not accept that view. Our problems are manmade. Therefore, they can be solved by man. And man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings. Man’s reason and spirit have often solved the seemingly unsolvable and we believe they can do it again.”
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Oprah Winfrey at Harvard University, 2013
“At some point you are bound to stumble because if you’re constantly doing what we do, raising the bar. If you’re constantly pushing yourself higher, higher the law of averages not to mention the Myth of Icarus predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction.”
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at Wellesley College, 2015
“My writing might not have ended up being successful. But the point is that I tried. We cannot always bend the world into the shapes we want but we can try, we can make a concerted and real and true effort. And you are privileged that, because of your education here, you have already been given many of the tools that you will need to try. Always just try. Because you never know.”