Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British novelist, short-story writer, and poet. This winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1907) published more than two hundred works of poetry and prose.
Born in Bombay, India, where his father taught art, Kipling grew up in England. He returned to India and became a journalist for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. His experience of the diversity of life in colonial India during the glory days of the British Raj inspired his popular poems and short stories.
Kipling is well known for poems such as “If” and “Gunga Din,” and for his children’s tales, mainly The Jungle Book (1894) and Just So Stories (1902.) His support of English imperialism contributed to this popularity at first but became out of favor in the 20th century.
Kipling is regarded as one of the greatest English writers of the short story. He influenced T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, and Jorge Luis Borges. Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself, remained unfinished.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Rudyard Kipling
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 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
The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool!
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Cleverness
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Agreement
Savings represent much more than mere money value. They are the proof that the saver is worth something in himself. Any fool can waste; any fool can muddle; but it takes something more of a man to save and the more he saves the more of a man he makes of himself. Waste and extravagance unsettle a man’s mind for every crisis; thrift, which means some form of self-restraint, steadies it.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Wealth
The female of the species is more deadly than the male.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Woman
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Words, One liners, Drugs
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: Racism, Man
All we have of freedom—all we use or know—this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Freedom
There rise her timeless capitals of empires daily born,
Whose plinths are laid at midnight and whose streets are packed at morn;
And here come tired youths and maids that feign to love or sin
In tones like rusty razor blades to tunes like smitten tin.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Hollywood
If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you… . The world will be yours and everything in it, what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
Of all the liars in the world sometimes the worst are our own fears.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Anger
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
Until thy feet have trod the Road
Advise not wayside folk,
Nor till thy back has borne the Load
Break in upon the broke.
Chase not with undesired largesse
Of sympathy the heart
Which, knowing her own bitterness,
Presumes to dwell apart.
Employ not that glad hand to raise
The God-forgotten head
To Heaven and all the neighbours’ gaze—
Cover thy mouth instead.
The quivering chin, the bitten lip,
The cold and sweating brow,
Later may yearn for fellowship—
Not now, you ass, not now!
Time, not thy ne’er so timely speech,
Life, not thy views thereon,
Shall furnish or deny to each
His consolation.
Or, if impelled to interfere,
Exhort, uplift, advise,
Lend not a base, betraying ear
To all the victim’s cries.
Only the Lord can understand,
When those first pangs begin,
How much is reflex action and
How much is really sin.
E’en from good words thyself refrain,
And tremblingly admit
There is no anodyne for pain
Except the shock of it.
So, when thine own dark hour shall fall,
Unchallenged canst thou say:
I never worried you at all,
For God’s sake go away!
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Advice
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: Religion, Christians, Christianity
What you do when you don’t have to determines what you will be when you can no longer help it.
—Rudyard Kipling
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
I always prefer to believe the best of everybody — it saves so much trouble.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Tolerance, Faith, Kindness
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
Teach us Delight in simple things,
And Mirth that has no bitter springs.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Simplicity
A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Mind, The Mind
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
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
A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Certainty, Intuition
Heaven grant us patience with a man in love.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Patience
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
Never praise a sister to a sister in the hope of your compliments reaching he proper ears.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Praise
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: Scientists, Science
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
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
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, Character, The Present
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: History
For the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Sin
‘Til we are built like angels, with hammer, and chisel, and pen, we will work for ourselves and a woman, for ever and ever, Amen.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Woman
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, Army, The Military
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: World, Equality, People
Four things greater than all things are, Women and Horses and Power and War.
—Rudyard Kipling
The colonel’s lady and Judy O’Grady are sisters under their skins.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Women
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
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: Christmas, Religion, Holidays
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