Rudyard Kipling Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect.

Rudyard Kipling
You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.

Rudyard Kipling
You perceive, do you not, that our national fairy tales reflect the inmost desires of the Briton and the Gaul?

Rudyard Kipling
We are very slightly changed From the semi-apes who ranged India's prehistoric clay; He that drew the longest bow Ran his brother down, you know, As we run men down to-day.

Rudyard Kipling
No doubt but ye are the People - absolute, strong and wise;
Whatever your hear has desired ye have not withheld from your eyes.
On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!

Rudyard Kipling
Like the destroyer, the submarine has created its own type of officer and man with language and traditions apart from the rest of the service, and yet at the heart unchangingly of the Service

Rudyard Kipling
Any fool can waste, any fool can muddle, but it takes something of a man to save, and the more he saves the more of a man does it make of him.

Rudyard Kipling
If a man brings a good mind to what he reads he may become, as it were, the spiritual descendant to some extent of great men, and this link, this spiritual hereditary tie, may help to just kick the beam in the right direction at a vital crisis; or may keep him from drifting through the long slack times when, so to speak, we are only fielding and no balls are coming our way.

Rudyard Kipling
And some can pot begonias and some can bud a rose, And some are hardly fit to trust with anything that grows...

Rudyard Kipling
Never was isle so little, never was sea so lone,
But over the scud and the palm-trees an English flag was flown.

Rudyard Kipling
An' that blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones.

Rudyard Kipling
One fine morning in the middle of the Precession of the Equinoxes.... That very next morning, when there was nothing left of the Equinoxes, because the Precession had preceded according to precedent...

Rudyard Kipling
Just statin' evidential facts beyon' all argument.

Rudyard Kipling
I worked like a horse and I ate like a hog and I slept like a dead man.

Rudyard Kipling
There is no sound, no echo of sound, in the deserts of the deep, Or the great grey level plains of ooze where the shellburred cables creep. Here is the womb of the world — here on the tie-ribs of earth Words, and the words of men, flicker and flutter and beat.

Rudyard Kipling
One learns more from a good scholar in a rage than from a score of lucid and laborious drudges.

Rudyard Kipling
Let each man be judged by his deeds, I have paid my price to live with myself on the terms that I willed.

Rudyard Kipling
Who shall doubt "the secret hid Under Cheops' pyramid" Was that the contractor did Cheops out of several million?

Rudyard Kipling
Nations have passed away and left no traces, And history gives the naked cause of it - One single simple reason in all cases; They fell because their peoples were not fit.

Rudyard Kipling
No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons.

Rudyard Kipling
Good morrn, M'Andrew! Back again? An' how's your bilge to-day? Miscallin' technicalities but handlin' me my chair To drink Madeira wi' three Earls — the auld Fleet Engineer That started as a boiler-whelp — when steam and he were low.

Rudyard Kipling
When man has come to the Turnstiles of Night, all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colorless.

Rudyard Kipling
It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening.

Rudyard Kipling
No one accuses the gunner of maudlin affection for anything except his beasts and his weapons. He serves as least three jealous gods-his horse and all its sadlery and harness; his gun, whose least detail of efficiency is more important than men's lives; and, when these have been attended to, the never-ending mystery of his art commands him.

Rudyard Kipling
Satan himself can't save a woman who wears thirty-shilling corsets under a thirty-guinea costume.

Rudyard Kipling
It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky.

Rudyard Kipling
Let us now remember many honourable women, Such as bade us turn again when we were like to die.

Rudyard Kipling
The cure for this ill is not to sit still, Or frost with a book by the fire; But to take a large hoe and a shovel also, And dig till you gently perspire.

Rudyard Kipling
Before the High and Far-Off Times, O my Best Beloved, came the Time of the Very Beginnings; and that was in the days when the Eldest Magician was getting Things ready. First he got the Earth ready; then he got the Sun ready; and then he told all the Animals that they could come out and play.

Rudyard Kipling
To discuss medicine before the ignorant is of one piece with teaching the peacock to sing.

Rudyard Kipling