Power without responsibility—the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Media, Responsibility
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: The Military, Army, Navy
We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Failures, Mistakes, Excuses, Failure
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
Meddling with another man’s folly is always thankless work.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Problems
I have eaten your bread and salt.
I have drunk your water and wine.
The deaths ye died I have watched beside
And the lives ye led were mine.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Wine
Gentleman-rankers out on the spree, damned from here to Eternity.
—Rudyard Kipling
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody — it saves so much trouble.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Faith, Tolerance, Kindness
Daughter am I in my mother’s house;
But mistress in my own.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Perspective
‘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
More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Work
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
But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Humankind, Humanity
He wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Quotations, Knowledge
Pleasant the snaffle of courtship, improving the manners and carriage; but the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible throw bit of Marriage.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Marriage
Never praise a sister to a sister in the hope of your compliments reaching he proper ears.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Praise
When ‘Omer smote ‘is bloomin’ lyre, He’d ‘eard men sing by land an’ sea; An’ what he thought ‘e might require, ‘E went and took-the same as me.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Life
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: Character, The Present, Advice
A Nation spoke to a Nation,
A Queen sent word to a Throne:”Daughter am I in my mothers house,
But mistress in my own.
The gates are mine to open,
As the gates are mine to close,
And I set my house in order,”
Said our Lady of the Snows.
—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
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves “It’s pretty, but is it Art?”
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Arts, Art, Artists
Heaven grant us patience with a man in love.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Patience
If any question why we died, tell them, because our fathers lied.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: War
If I was damned of body and soul,
I know whose prayers would make me whole,
Mother o’ mine, O mother o’mine.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Mothers
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Persistence, Perseverance
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: Christians, Religion, Christianity
A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Mind, The Mind
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Words, One liners, Drugs
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: You’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
Call a truce, then, to our labors—let us feast with friends and neighbors, and be merry as the custom of our caste; for if “faint and forced the laughter,” and if sadness follow after, we are richer by one mocking Christmas past.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Holidays, Christmas, Religion
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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