Quotes for a retirement speech or card

A teacher's influence passes from student to student and generation to generation, so no one can say where it ends.

The melancholy Jaques compares life to a play in seven acts, from baby to old age. It is a witty, gloomy view of life that the play quietly answers.

A skill takes so long to master that one lifetime is barely enough. It is a call to start now and to respect how much there is to learn.

Polonius declares that being brief is the essence of intelligence, in the middle of one of the longest-winded speeches in the play. “Wit” meant good sense, not just humor.

Latin for “seize the day,” or more literally “pluck the day” like ripe fruit. Horace tells a friend to enjoy today instead of worrying about a future no one can know.

Newton credits earlier scientists for making his discoveries possible. He borrowed the image of dwarfs on giants' shoulders from medieval scholars.

A wry aside in a letter about the new U.S. Constitution. Franklin made it famous, but the joke was already in print more than seventy years earlier.

Roosevelt's defense of people who try and fail over critics who never try. It was part of a long speech in Paris about the duties of citizens in a democracy.

Churchill's tribute to the fighter pilots of the Royal Air Force during the Battle of Britain, a few thousand airmen defending a nation of millions.

Everything flows and changes, so the river is never the same twice, and neither are you. The popular wording is a later paraphrase of Heraclitus's surviving fragments.

Twain's joke when a newspaper wrongly reported he was dying. His real words were drier: “The report of my death was an exaggeration.”

The song asks whether old friends should be forgotten, and answers no. “Auld lang syne” means roughly “old long since,” or “the good old days,” and the singers drink a cup of kindness to them.

Keep wanting more and keep being willing to look foolish by trying new things. Jobs borrowed the words from the farewell issue of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Latin for “time flees,” the source of the English saying “time flies.” Virgil's fuller line adds that the time lost can never be recovered.

Armstrong's first words as he stepped onto the Moon. He said he meant “one small step for a man,” and the missing word has been debated ever since.

Polonius's parting advice to his son Laertes: be honest with yourself, and you will be honest with others. It is good advice from a character who rarely follows it.

Life moves through opposite seasons, birth and death, weeping and laughing, and each has its proper time. The passage is both comforting and a reminder that we do not control the timing.

A traveler picks one of two paths that were “really about the same,” then imagines telling the story years later as if the choice made all the difference. It is a poem about how we tell stories about our choices.

Whatever work is in front of you, give it everything you have, because life is short and there will be no chance to do it later.

Spoken weeks before the Civil War ended and six weeks before Lincoln was killed. He asked the winning side to heal the nation without revenge.

Steady, useful work protects us from three things that ruin lives: having nothing to do, falling into bad habits, and being poor.