If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; You’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
They copied all they could copy, But they couldn’t copy my mind; And I left them sweatin’ and stealin’, A year and a half behind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Mind
Gawd knows, and ‘E won’t split on a pal.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: God, Faith, Divinity
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Navy, The Military, Army
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody — it saves so much trouble.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Tolerance, Kindness, Faith
God gives all men all earth to love, but since man’s heart is small, ordains for each one spot shall prove beloved over all.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Travel
All the people like us are We, And everyone else is They. And They live over the sea, While We live over the way. But-would you believe it?-They look upon We As only a sort of They.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Equality, People, World
Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho’ they come from the ends of the earth!
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Man, Racism
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.”
—Rudyard Kipling
Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Children
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Failures, Excuses, Failure, Mistakes
Four things greater than all things are, Women and Horses and Power and War.
—Rudyard Kipling
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Unity
I keep six honest serving men; they taught me all I knew; their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Wisdom, Curiosity, Think
Take up the White Man’s burden—send forth the best ye breed—go, bind your sons to exile to serve your captives need.
—Rudyard Kipling
Meddling with another man’s folly is always thankless work.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Problems
If England was what England seems, An’ not the England of our dreams, But only putty, brass and paint, ‘Ow quick we’d chuck her! But she ain’t.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Britain
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with kings—nor lose the common touch, if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, if all men count with you, but none too much: if you can fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, yours is the earth and everything that’s in it, and—which is more—you’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Advice, The Present, Character
The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Christianity, Religion, Christians
The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth point goes; The butterfly upon the road Preaches contentment to that toad.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Advice, Animals
Daughter am I in my mother’s house;
But mistress in my own.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Perspective
He wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Quotations, Knowledge
There was a small boy of Quebec
Who was buried in snow to his neck
When they said, “Are you friz?”
He replied, “Yes, I is—
But we don’t call this cold in Quebec.”
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Snow
All the money in the world is no use to a man or his country if he spends it as fast as he makes it. All he has left is his bills and the reputation for being a fool.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Money
Borrow trouble for yourself if that’s your nature, but don’t lend it to your neighbors.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Anxiety, Attitude, Trouble, Worry
For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State, they arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate. Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none; but sometimes in a smoking room, one learns why things were done.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Science, Scientists
‘Tis beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It’s just IT. Some women will stay in a man’s memory if they once walked down a street.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Style
A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Mind, The Mind
If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: War
I had six honest serving men. They taught me all I knew. Their names were: Where, What, When, Why, How and Who.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Learning, Questions
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- J. K. Rowling English Novelist
- C. S. Lewis Irish-born Author, Scholar
- Mary Wollstonecraft English Writer, Feminist
- Doris Lessing British Novelist, Poet
- H. G. Wells English Novelist, Historian
- A. A. Milne British Humorist, Children’s Writer
- Russell Hoban American Author
- Winston Churchill British Head of State
- Robert Baden-Powell, 1st Baron Baden-Powell Founder of the Boy Scouts
- Shel Silverstein American Cartoonist, Author
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