The Best Commencement Speeches Ever Given

Failure meant a stripping away of the inessential, she told Harvard on June 5, 2008, which is a strange thing to say to people on the best day of their academic lives. The speech's own name is The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination — and Little, Brown published her book of it, Very Good Lives, on April 14, 2015, illustrated by Joel Holland, with that phrase carried on the cover as the subtitle.

Speaking to the College of Arts and Sciences undergraduate convocation in the Carrier Dome on May 11, 2013, he built the whole address on one admission: what I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. The New York Times posted the transcript three months later, and Random House published his book of it, Congratulations, by the Way, on April 22, 2014.

Nine lessons, delivered on September 25, 2013 and openly modelled on the nine lessons and carols of the traditional Christmas service. Lesson one is that you don't have to have a dream — chase short, specific goals instead and be surprised by where they put you. Ebury Press took that lesson for the title of his 2024 book, which draws on three of his university addresses.

Grand Central published his expanded version as Make Your Bed on April 4, 2017, out of the May 17, 2014 ceremony. If you make your bed every morning you will have accomplished the first task of the day — an admiral telling new graduates to tidy up. It should have died in the room. Instead the sentence became a book title and stayed one.

Stay hungry. Stay foolish. Those words are not his — Stewart Brand printed them under a photograph of a country road on the back cover of the final Whole Earth Catalog, and on June 12, 2005 they were borrowed for a closing line. Two decades on, the borrowed sentence is the part people can still quote.

Comedy carries most of the June 12, 2011 address, and then it turns: it is our failure to become our perceived ideal that ultimately defines us and makes us unique. Dartmouth's own write-up files the speech under failure and conviction, which is the right pair of nouns — the jokes are the delivery system and that sentence is the payload.

On May 30, 2013, with Rowling's 2008 address at the same university behind it, Harvard's speaker made a version of that case in one sentence: failure is just life trying to move us in another direction. That line has come loose from the speech entirely — it gets repeated by people who could not name the ceremony or the speaker.

His father could have been a great comedian, he told the graduates on May 24, 2014, but made a conservative choice and took a safe job as an accountant — and was let go from it when Carrey was twelve. You can fail at what you don't want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love. The story is what makes the line land.

Point number one, of several, in the 2015 Dillard address: put God first, in everything you do. It is the least hedged thing anyone on this list says, and it is why the speech circulates under that phrase rather than under a speaker or a college. Worth knowing that the fall forward line people pair with it comes from a different ceremony — Penn, 2011.

A sitting president in his final year, at Howard on May 7, 2016, telling graduates to be confident in your blackness. The line is the artefact, and it sits oddly among the others: most commencement advice is written to apply to everyone in the seats, and this was written to apply to the particular people in front of him.

He had graduated from Howard himself, and on May 12, 2018 he spent as much of the address praising the students' own protest campaign as giving advice — NPR's report from the day leads on the activism rather than the aphorism. The aphorism is what lasted: purpose is the essential element of you, the reason you are on the planet at this particular time.

Graduates at Yankee Stadium heard one instruction on May 18, 2022, from a speaker collecting an honorary doctorate of her own: learn to live alongside cringe. The premise is that you will look back at this year and wince, and that the wincing is no reason to have done less of anything — advice shaped by an adolescence lived in public.

Effortless is a myth — the phrase from the June 9, 2024 address, and it arrives with arithmetic attached. He won almost 80% of the 1,526 singles matches he played, he told the graduates, and 54% of the points inside them. A career of that size resting on a four-point margin is a harder case for persistence than an adjective could make.