Rudyard Kipling Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

Of all the trees that grow so fair,
Old England to adorn,
Greater are none beneath the Sun,
Than Oak, and Ash, and Thorn.

Rudyard Kipling
We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints.

Rudyard Kipling
They settled things by making up a saying, 'What the Bandar-log think now the Jungle will think later': and that comforted them a great deal.

Rudyard Kipling
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst.

Rudyard Kipling
For to admire an' for to see,
For to be'old this world so wide—
It never done no good to me,
But I can't drop it if I tried!

Rudyard Kipling
You must learn to forgive a man when he's in love. He's always a nuisance.

Rudyard Kipling
After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food.

Rudyard Kipling
He will kill mice and he will be kind to babies...but when the moon gets up and the night comes, he is the Cat that Walks by Himself.

Rudyard Kipling
He's an absent-minded beggar and his weaknesses are great—
But we and Paul must take him as we find him.

Rudyard Kipling
They will come back, come back again, As long as the red earth rolls. He never wasted a leaf or a tree. Do you think he would squander souls?

Rudyard Kipling
Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk;
Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,
Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Rudyard Kipling
'There is none like to me!' says the Cub in the pride of his earliest kill;
But the jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be still.

Rudyard Kipling
Men and women may sometimes, after great effort, achieve a creditable lie; but the house, which is their temple, cannot say anything save the truth of those who have lived in it.

Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your 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;
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.

Rudyard Kipling
Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

Rudyard Kipling
In the flush of the hot June prime,
O'ersleek flood-tides afire,
I hear him hurry the chime
To the bidding of checked Desire;
Till the sweated ringers tire
And the wild bob-majors die.
Could I wait for my turn in the godly choir?
(Shoal! 'Ware shoal!) Not I!

Rudyard Kipling
The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.

Rudyard Kipling
Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was: O my Best Beloved, when the tame animals were wild.

Rudyard Kipling
Body and spirit I surrendered whole
To harsh instructors—and received a soul...
If mortal man could change me through and through
From all I was—What may the God not do?

Rudyard Kipling
Two things greater than all things are,
The first is Love, and the second War.

Rudyard Kipling
Many religious people are deeply suspicious. They seem—for purely religious purposes, of course—to know more about iniquity than the unregenerate.

Rudyard Kipling
Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it takes a very clever woman to manage a fool.

Rudyard Kipling
Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can; But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man!

Rudyard Kipling
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains
And the women come out to cut up what remains
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.

Rudyard Kipling
Boots—boots—boots—boots—movin' up and down again!
There's no discharge in the war!

Rudyard Kipling
Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes,
It will vanish and the stars will shine again,
Because, for all our power and weight and size,
We are nothing more than children of your brain!

Rudyard Kipling
A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Rudyard Kipling
For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' "Chuck 'im out, the brute!" But it's "Savior of 'is country" when the guns begin to shoot.

Rudyard Kipling
Four things greater than all things are,—
Women and Horses and Power and War.

Rudyard Kipling
I have stated it plain, an' my argument's thus (It's all one, says the Sapper) There's only one Corps which is perfect - that's us; An' they call us Her Majesty's Engineers, With the rank and pay of a Sapper!

Rudyard Kipling