20 Inspiring Graduation Quotes to Add in Your Videos/Slideshows/Cards

Ollie Mattison

Mar 27, 2024• Proven solutions

Graduation is a special event that comes around only a handful of times in someone’s life. It marks a special occasion but more than that, it’s an ending to a chapter and a start on a new adventure. As graduation ceremonies are celebrations of our accomplishments they’re also a forum for departing support and advice before beginning new challenges.

Incorporating well-chosen quotes into the graduation celebrations allows us to take stock in the advice and motivation offered by those that have gone before. Before starting the next journey make sure you inspire and motivate the newly graduated by utilizing motivational, clever quotes from others that have been through it before.

20 Inspiring Graduation Quotes to Daughter/Son/Friend

Here are twenty quotes that will amuse, inspire and cause reflection amongst graduates.

1. “Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” - Winston Churchill

2. “Just about a month from now I'm set adrift, with a diploma for a sail and lots of nerve for oars.” - Richard Halliburton

3. “Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.”- Al Bernstein

4. “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

5. “Even if you are on the right track, you will get run over if you just sit there.”- Will Rogers

6. “Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else’s path unless you’re in the woods and you’re lost and you see a path then by all means you should follow that.”- Ellen Degeneres

7. “A graduation ceremony is an event where the commencement speaker tells thousands of students dressed in identical caps and gowns that "individuality" is the key to success.”- Robert Orben

8. “Parents: You will spend more money framing your child’s diploma than they will earn in the next six months. It’s tough out there, so be patient. The only people hiring right now are Panera and Mexican drug cartels.”- Conan O’Brien

9. “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

10. “The unfortunate, yet truly exciting thing about your life, is that there is no core curriculum. The entire place is an elective.”- Jon Stewart

11. “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing worth knowing can be taught.” - Oscar Wilde

12. “Minds are like parachutes - they only function when open.”- Tomas Dewar

13. “In football we always said that the other team couldn't beat us. We had to be sure that we didn't beat ourselves. And that's what people have to do too -- make sure they don't beat themselves.”- Woody Hayes

14. “I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.”- Jim Carrey

15. "Thankfully dreams can change. If we’d all stuck with our first dream, the world would be overrun with cowboys and princesses. So whatever your dream is right now, if you don’t achieve it, you haven’t failed and you’re not some loser—but just as importantly—if you do get your dream, you’re not a winner."- Stephen Colbert

16. "It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously, that you might as well not have lived at all; in which case, you’ve failed by default."- J.K. Rowling

17. "You get to make your own luck. 80% of success in your career will come from just showing up. The world is run by those who show up…not those who wait to be asked."- Steve Blank

18. "Your families are extremely proud of you. You can't imagine the sense of relief they are experiencing. This would be a most opportune time to ask for money." - Gary Bolding

19. “It is indeed ironic that we spend our school days yearning to graduate and our remaining days waxing nostalgic about our school days.”- Isabel Waxman

20. “Commencement speeches were invented largely in the belief that outgoing college students should never be released into the world until they have been properly sedated.”- Garry Trudeau

Remember to help graduates get off on the right foot. Impart words of wisdom onto them that will make them laugh, cry and feel charged to go out and face the unknown. Ponder long on what to say or write for graduation day because graduates will carry it with them for the rest of their lives.

How to Add Graduation Quotes to Video with Filmora

In the following part, I’ll show you how to use Wondershare Filmora to add the quotes to your photo or your graduation video. If you haven’t installed Filmora on your computer, click the download button below to start.

Here is my case; I’m making a graduation video for my friend. And I want to make the video with our travel photos and videos, but found photos are taken in horizontal and vertically randomly. Since both of us are watching videos on the computer, so I set the Project aspect ratio to 16:9. And then add the Background Blur effects to the frames with black bars.

Then I add my favorite quotes to the video; the editing interface looks like below:

Note: if you want to extract one frame from the video and save it as an image, you can click the Camera icon to take a snapshot from Filmora.

Next, you can choose one of the hottest graduation songs and add them to the video. Filmora allows you to make a graduation video with music, effects, and transitions easily. Below is a graduation related video made with Filmora I found on YouTube. I hope it can inspire you to make a better graduation video.

Ollie Mattison

Ollie Mattison is a writer and a lover of all things video.

Follow @Ollie Mattison