Stephen Ambrose Quotes

Keep all special thoughts and memories for lifetimes to come. Share these keepsakes with others to inspire hope and build from the past, which can bridge to the future.

Wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is the promise of the future.

[Addressing Thomas Jefferson:] Your taste is judicious in liking better the dreams of the future than the history of the past.

A whole stack of memories never equal one little hope.

History provides an antidote to cynicism about the past.

We are tomorrow's past.

The future is unknowable, but the past may give us hope.

… we should not indulge in looking backwards with envy to the past, but to keep our eyes ahead of us with hope for the future.

Only by not forgetting the past can we be the master of the future.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time

That's why we have memory. And the opposite of memory— hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can built off our pasts and make future.

The way you remember the past depends upon your hope for the future. And if what you see in your future has no hope, it has no potential, then you view the past that brought you to here as not very good.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

Let them look to the past, but let them also look to the future; let them look to the land of their ancestors, but let them look also to the land of their children.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

It is my firm belief that I have a link with the past and a responsibility to the future. I cannot give up. I cannot despair. There's a whole future, generations to come. I have to keep trying.

A strange thing is memory, and hope; one looks backward, and the other forward; one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

The past is only the present become invisible and mute; and because it is invisible and mute, its memorized glances and its murmurs are infinitely precious. We are tomorrow's past.

There’s a big difference between history and the future.

What is past cannot be rewritten, but it is within our power to rewrite the future.

Commemorating the present and looking forward to a more promising future has always depended on learning from the past..

It is history that teaches us to hope.

Take time to gather up the past so that you will be able to draw from your experience and invest them in the future.

I believe that I am only at a beginning, only knocking at a door, and I believe that the best is yet to come.