Reads tagged with “commencement”
Nobel-Winning Poet Joseph Brodsky on the Remedy for Existential Boredom
“Try to stay passionate, leave your cool to constellations. Passion, above all, is a remedy against boredom. Another one, of course, is pain… passion’s frequent aftermath.”
Making the Impossible Possible: 21-Year-Old Hillary Rodham’s Remarkable 1969 Wellesley College Commencement Speech
“If the only tool we have ultimately to use is our lives, so we use it in the way we can by choosing a way to live that will demonstrate the way we feel and the way we know.”
How Do You Measure Your Life: Artist Carrie Mae Weems’s Stirring SVA Commencement Address
“Open and alert, you respond sensitively to the world around you, and it causes you a great deal of pain and tremendous trepidation. But, of course, these are the natural byproducts of a closely examined life.”
On the Soul-Sustaining Necessity of Resisting Self-Comparison and Fighting Cynicism: A Commencement Address
“In its passivity and resignation, cynicism is a hardening, a calcification of the soul. Hope is a stretching of its ligaments, a limber reach for something greater.”
Toni Morrison on How to Be Your Own Story and Reap the Rewards of Adulthood in a Culture That Fetishizes Youth
“True adulthood… is a difficult beauty, an intensely hard won glory, which commercial forces and cultural vapidity should not be permitted to deprive you of.”
The Search for a New Humility: Václav Havel on Reclaiming Our Human Interconnectedness in a Globalized Yet Divided World
“Our respect for other people… can only grow from a humble respect for the cosmic order and from an awareness that we are a part of it… and that nothing of what we do is lost, but rather becomes part of the eternal memory of being.”
Joseph Brodsky on the Greatest Antidote to Evil
“What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”
Speaking Truth to Power and the Value of Counterpoints: Madeleine Albright’s Surprising Commencement Address
“We should use our opinions to start discussions, not to end them.”
The Six Pillars of the Wholehearted Life: Parker Palmer’s Spectacular Naropa University Commencement Address
“Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to the shadow side of yourself… When you are able to say, ‘I am … my shadow as well as my light,’ the shadow’s power is put in service of the good.”
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