It’s hard to believe that another school year is coming to an end. Through good times and bad times, we’ve found new ways to show our love and support in our classrooms. We’ve found pockets of joy and overcome challenges with our students to cross the finish line together. Here are some of the best end-of-school-year quotes to honor this moment.
Once you’ve finished reading these great quotes for the end of the year and the last day of school, be sure to check out our list of favorite all-time classroom quotes!
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End-of-Year Quotes Posters
Grab five of our favorite end-of-year quotes in poster form to hang around the classroom or anywhere you need some motivation to make it to the finish line.
Our Favorite End-of-Year Quotes
1. “Do what you have to do until you can do what you want to do.” — Oprah Winfrey
2. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” — Unknown
3. “Sunsets are proof that endings can be beautiful.” — Beau Taplin
4. “Intelligence plus character—that is the goal of true education.” — Martin Luther King Jr.
5. “Your education is a dress rehearsal for a life that is yours to lead.” — Nora Ephron
6. “Success is the sum of small efforts, repeated day in and day out.” — Robert Collier
7. “What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.” — Joseph Addison
8. “Get action. Seize the moment. Man was never intended to become an oyster.” — Theodore Roosevelt
9. “They may forget what you said but they will never forget how you made them feel.” — Carl W. Buehner
10. “The greatest sign of success for a teacher … is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.’” — Maria Montessori
11. “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” — Unknown
12. “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” — Nelson Mandela
13. “Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly.” — President John F. Kennedy
14. “Someone once told me not to bite off more than I could chew. I’d rather choke on greatness than nibble on mediocrity.” — Unknown
15. “Always find time for the things that make you feel happy to be alive.” — Matt Haig
17. “Just because the past didn’t turn out like you wanted it to doesn’t mean your future can’t be better than you ever imagined.” — Anonymous
18. “You don’t want to look back and know you could’ve done better.” — Unknown
19. “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” — Thomas Edison
20. “You can. End of story.” — Cory Lewis
21. “Every time you tear a leaf off a calendar, you present a new place for new ideas.” — Charles Kettering
22. “What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from.” — T.S. Eliot
23. “We all learn by experience, but some of us have to go to summer school.” — Peter De Vries
24. “What I remember most about high school are the memories I created with my friends.” — J.J. Watt
25. “No matter what happens in life, be good to people. Being good to people is a wonderful legacy to leave behind.” — Taylor Swift
26. “How paramount the future is to the present when one is surrounded by children.” — Charles Darwin
27. “Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future.” — Hannah Arendt
28. “Life—a culmination of the past, an awareness of the present, an indication of a future beyond knowledge, the quality that gives a touch of divinity to matter.” — Charles Lindbergh
29. “I attribute my success to this—I never gave or took any excuse.” — Florence Nightingale
30. “Discipline is the soul of an army. It makes small numbers formidable; procures success to the weak, and esteem to all.” — President George Washington
31. “Achieve success in any area of life by identifying the optimum strategies and repeating them until they become habits.” — Charles J. Givens
32. “People seldom see the halting and painful steps by which the most insignificant success is achieved.” — Annie Sullivan
33. “There is power in thinking. And you can use that power to enhance your success potential if you spend some time every day thinking of yourself as a success.” — Joyce Brothers
34. “A desire to be in charge of our own lives, a need for control, is born in each of us. It is essential to our mental health, and our success, that we take control.” — Bob Bennett
35. “Great success in examinations does naturally not as a rule go with originality of thought.” — Edward Carpenter
36. “Year’s end is neither an end nor a beginning but a going on, with all the wisdom that experience can instill in us.” — Hal Borland
37. “We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?” — George Orwell
38. “We don’t see the end of the tunnel, but I must say I don’t think it is darker than it was a year ago, and in some ways lighter.” — President John F. Kennedy
39. “It is reasonable that a man should be something worthier at the end of the year than he was at the beginning.” — Henry David Thoreau
40. “Change your life today. Don’t gamble on the future, act now, without delay.” — Simone de Beauvoir
41. “Education and admonition commence in the first years of childhood, and last to the very end of life.” — Plato
42. “The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us.” — G.K. Chesterton
43. “Dreams come true; without that possibility, nature would not incite us to have them.” — John Updike
44. “Let there be no purpose in friendship save the deepening of the spirit.” — Kahlil Gibran
45. “Victory is not won in miles but in inches. Win a little now, hold your ground, and later win a little more.” — Louis L’Amour
46. “Remember: never walk away from failure. On the contrary, study it carefully—and imaginatively—for its hidden assets.” — Michael Korda
47. “To acquire knowledge, one must study; but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.” — Marilyn vos Savant
48. “If you want to live a happy life, tie it to a goal, not to people or objects.” — Albert Einstein
49. “Success is a state of mind. If you want success, start thinking of yourself as a success.” — Joyce Brothers
50. “Learn as if you were not reaching your goal and as though you were scared of missing it.” — Confucius
51. “Have faith in your skills. Doubt kills more dreams than failure ever will.” — Suzy Kassem
52. “Obstacles are necessary for success because in selling, as in all careers of importance, victory comes only after many struggles and countless defeats.” — Og Mandino
53. “Once a positive goal is chosen, you should decide to pursue it all the way to the end. Even if it is not realized, at least there will be no regret.” — Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
54. “Experience shows that success is due less to ability than to zeal.” — Charles Buxton
55. “I am learning all the time. The tombstone will be my diploma.” — Eartha Kitt
56. “Tell me to what you pay attention and I will tell you who you are.” — José Ortega y Gasset
57. “There is surely no greater wisdom than well to time the beginnings and endings of things.” — Francis Bacon
58. “An educated man is not one whose memory is trained to carry a few dates in history—he is one who can accomplish things.” — Henry Ford
59. “Accept the challenges, so that you may feel the exhilaration of victory.” — George S. Patton
60. “The making of friends, who are real friends, is the best token we have of a man’s success in life.” — Edward Everett Hale
61. “Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” — Carl Jung
62. “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
63. “Yesterday ended last night. Every day is a new beginning. Learn the skill of forgetting. And move on.” — Norman Vincent Peale
64. “The strings to our past are burned because we need a new beginning.” — Caroline Myss
65. “No matter how many goals you have achieved, you must set your sights on a higher one.” — Jessica Savitch
66. “The season of failure is the best time for sowing the seeds of success.” — Paramahansa Yogananda
67. “Even if you lose yourself in wrath
for a hundred thousand years,
at the end you will discover,
it is me, who is the culmination of your dreams.” — Rumi
68. “I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.” — J.B. Priestley
69. “They always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself.” — Andy Warhol
70. “This is the ending. Now not day only shall be beloved, but night too shall be beautiful and blessed and all its fear pass away.” — J.R.R. Tolkien
71. “Failure will never overtake me if my determination to succeed is strong enough.” — Og Mandino
72. “Persistent people begin their success where others end in failure.” — Edward Eggleston
73. “Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.” — Anthony Robbins
74. “Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.” — Langston Hughes
75. “If a little day-dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less but to dream more, to dream all the time.” — Marcel Proust
76. “In a higher world it is otherwise, but here below to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often.” — John Henry Newman
77. “Laughter is not at all a bad beginning for a friendship, and it is far the best ending for one.” — Oscar Wilde
78. “If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.” — Jim Carrey
79. “Every ending is a new beginning.” — Marianne Williamson
80. “Goals allow you to control the direction of change in your favor.” — Brian Tracy
81. “There are no secrets to success. It is the result of preparation, hard work and learning from failure.” — Colin Powell
82. “The beginnings and endings of all human undertakings are untidy, the building of a house, the writing of a novel, the demolition of a bridge, and, eminently, the finish of a voyage.” — John Galsworthy
83. “These success encourages: they can because they think they can.” — Virgil
84. “Wherever we go, whatever we do, self is the sole subject we study and learn.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson
85. “Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task.” — Haim Ginott
86. “In youth we learn; in age we understand.” — Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach
87. “A man has to have goals—for a day, for a lifetime.” — Ted Williams
88. “Success on any major scale requires you to accept responsibility.” — Michael Korda
89. “I have discovered in life that there are ways of getting almost anywhere you want to go, if you really want to go.” — Langston Hughes
90. “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.” — Edgar Allan Poe
91. “If you can react the same way to winning and losing, that’s a big accomplishment. That quality is important because it stays with you the rest of your life.” — Chris Evert
92. “If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” — Orson Welles
93. “I won’t say goodbye my friend,
For you and I will meet again.” — Tom Petty
94. “Teaching is a never-ending story. The work is never over; the job is never done.” — Andy Hargreaves
95. “Competition is a by-product of productive work, not its goal. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others.” — Ayn Rand
96. “Failure is not our only punishment for laziness: there is also the success of others.” — Jules Renard
97. “So goodbye dear, and Amen,
Here’s hoping we meet now and then,
It was great fun,
But it was just one of those things.” — Cole Porter
98. “We should regret our mistakes and learn from them, but never carry them forward into the future with us.” — Lucy Maud Montgomery
99. “We must believe in luck. For how else can we explain the success of those we don’t like?” — Jean Cocteau
100. “When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself.” — Langston Hughes
101. “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” — Thomas Henry Huxley
102. “One way to keep momentum going is to have constantly greater goals.” — Michael Korda
103. “Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.” — Andrew Grove
104. “Nothing said to us, nothing we can learn from others, reaches us so deep as that which we find in ourselves.” — Theodor Reik
105. “There’s a kind of release
And a kind of torment in every goodbye for every man.” — Cecil Day Lewis
106. “Remember my friend to enjoy your planning as well as your accomplishment, for life is too short for negative energy.” — Bruce Lee
107. “The more you learn, if you learn it properly, the more clear you become and the more you know.” — Leonard Peikoff
108. “You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over.” — Richard Branson
109. “Passion presented with a greater challenge achieves a greater goal.” — Aberjhani
110. “As for accomplishments, I just did what I had to do as things came along.” — Eleanor Roosevelt
111. “Even knowing the ending was sad, I wouldn’t have deprived myself the beauty of the story.” — Sandra Brown
112. “Learning teacheth more in one year than experience in twenty.” — Roger Ascham
113. “Success is more a function of consistent common sense than it is of genius.” — An Wang
114. “Lay plans for the accomplishment of the difficult before it becomes difficult; make something big by starting with it when small.” — Lao Tzu
115. “I’ve said goodbye to Mathematics forever, and I assure you, I was delighted to see the last of those horrid goblins!” — Helen Keller
116. “The person who makes a success of living is the one who sees his goal steadily and aims for it unswervingly. That is dedication.” — Cecil B. De Mille
117. “You must act as if everything depended on your individual efforts. The secret of success is constancy of purpose.” — Benjamin Disraeli
118. “The present is the ever-moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.” — Frank Lloyd Wright
119. “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.” — Alan Kay
120. “Each morning is a new beginning of our life. Each day is a finished whole.” — Dietrich Bonhoeffer
121. “Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal. My strength lies solely in my tenacity.” — Louis Pasteur
122. “A minute’s success pays the failure of years.” — Robert Browning
123. “I loved the feeling of freedom in running, the fresh air, the feeling that the only person I’m competing with is me.” — Wilma Rudolph
124. “Always Leave Them Laughing When You Say Goodbye.” — George M. Cohan
125. “All our dreams can come true—if we have the courage to pursue them.” — Walt Disney
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