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
All we have of freedom—all we use or know—this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Freedom
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
Heaven grant us patience with a man in love.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Patience
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 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, Advice, The Present
If you can keep you head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; You’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: One liners, Words, Drugs
Words are the most powerful drugs used by mankind.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Power, Drugs, Communication, Love, Words
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
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
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
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
I wasted my substance, I know I did, on riotous living, so I did, but there’s nothing on record to show I did more than my betters have done.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Pleasure
Gawd knows, and ‘E won’t split on a pal.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Divinity, Faith, God
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
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: People, World, Equality
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
A man’s mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Mind, The Mind
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
Everyone is more or less mad on one point.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Insanity
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
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
Four things greater than all things are, Women and Horses and Power and War.
—Rudyard Kipling
More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Work
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
Daughter am I in my mother’s house;
But mistress in my own.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Perspective
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
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
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: Curiosity, Wisdom, Think
‘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
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