Rudyard Kipling Quotes

307 Sourced Quotes

Smells are surer than sounds or sights
To make your heart-strings crack —
They start those awful voices o'nights
That whisper, "Old man, come back!"

Rudyard Kipling
Such boasting as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law.

Rudyard Kipling
At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list.

Rudyard Kipling
Who hath desired the Sea?—the sight of salt water unbounded—
The heave and the halt and the hurl and the crash of the comber wind-hounded?

Rudyard Kipling
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 breath a word about your loss.

Rudyard Kipling
Yet there be certain times in a young man's life, when, through great sorrow or sin, all the boy in him is burnt and seared away so that he passes at one step to the more sorrowful state of manhood

Rudyard Kipling
Still the pine-woods scent the noon; still the catbird sings his tune;
Still the autumn sets the maple-forest blazing;
Still the grape-vine through the dusk flings her soul-compelling musk;
Still the fire-flies in the corn make night amazing!
The things that truly last when men and times have passed,
They are all in Pennsylvania this morning!

Rudyard Kipling
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.

Rudyard Kipling
She has no strong white arms to fold you,
But the ten-times-fingering weed to hold you—
Out on the rocks where the tide has rolled you.

Rudyard Kipling
For all we take we must pay, but the price is cruel high.

Rudyard Kipling
Sing, for faith and hope are high-
None so true as you and I-
Sing the Lovers' Litany:
"Love like ours can never die!"

Rudyard Kipling
Asia is not going to be civilised after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

Rudyard Kipling
And Ye take mine honour from me if Ye take away the sea!

Rudyard Kipling
We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart;
But the Devil whoops, as he whooped of old: It's clever, but is it Art?

Rudyard Kipling
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
When you get to a man in the case,
They're like as a row of pins—
For the Colonel's Lady an' Judy O'Grady
Are sisters under their skins!

Rudyard Kipling
"What are the bugles blowin' for?" said Files-on-Parade. "To turn you out, to turn you out," the Color-Sergeant said.

Rudyard Kipling
The colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under their skins.

Rudyard Kipling
Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?

Rudyard Kipling
Never again will I spend another winter in this accursed Bucket shop|bucketshop of a refrigerator called England.

Rudyard Kipling
Take up the White Man's burden—
And reap his old reward—
The blame of those ye better,
The hate of those ye guard.

Rudyard Kipling
Then it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Tommy 'ow's yer soul?'
But it's 'Thin red line of 'eroes' when the drums begin to roll.

Rudyard Kipling
Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half child.

Rudyard Kipling
In the High and Far-Off Times the Elephant, O Best Beloved, had no trunk. He had only a blackish, bulgy nose, as big as a boot, that he could wiggle about from side to side; but he couldn't pick up things with it.

Rudyard Kipling
Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.

Rudyard Kipling
When the cholera comes — as it will past a doubt — Keep out of the wet and don't go on the shout, For the sickness gets in as the liquor dies out, An' it crumples the young British soldier. Crum-, crum-, crumples the soldier.

Rudyard Kipling
The masterless man... afflicted with the magic of the necessary words.... Words that may become alive and walk up and down in the hearts of the hearers.

Rudyard Kipling
All sensible men are of the same religion, but no sensible man ever tells.

Rudyard Kipling
Go softly by that river side Or when you would depart, You'll find its every winding tied; And knotted round your heart.

Rudyard Kipling
Our loves are not given, but only lent, At compound interest of cent per cent.

Rudyard Kipling