“One, remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Two, never give up work. Work gives you meaning and purpose and life is empty without it. Three, if you are lucky enough to find love, remember it is there and don’t throw it away.”
— Stephen Hawking, University of Cambridge Graduation Ceremony (2015)
Stephen Hawking spent over fifty years as one of the most brilliant theoretical physicists in history, reshaping our understanding of black holes, time, and the origins of the universe. He did this while living with ALS, a degenerative motor neuron disease that gradually took his ability to move, speak, and breathe without assistance. By the time he addressed graduates at the University of Cambridge in 2015, he had outlived his original two-year prognosis by more than five decades.
That context matters when you hear these three pieces of advice. The man urging you to look up at the stars could not lift his own head. The man insisting that work gives life meaning had to fight his own body every day just to continue working. The man asking you not to throw love away had known both the warmth and the loss of it.
His words here are not philosophical abstractions. They are the distilled conclusions of a life lived under extraordinary pressure, where every choice about how to spend time and attention carried real weight. Curiosity, purpose, love. He kept returning to those three things because, for him, they were not ideals. They were survival.
The simplicity of the advice is part of what makes it worth sitting with.
