Kipling Quotes

He will be our friend for always and always and always. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Outsong in the Jungle

[Baloo:] For the sake of him who showed
One wise Frog the Jungle-Road,
Keep the Law the Man-Pack make
For thy blind old Baloo's sake!
Clean or tainted, hot or stale,
Hold it as it were the Trail,
Through the day and through the night,
Questing neither left nor right.
For the sake of him who loves
Thee beyond all else that moves,
When thy Pack would make thee pain,
Say: "Tabaqui sings again."
When thy Pack would work thee ill,
Say: "Shere Khan is yet to kill."
When the knife is drawn to slay,
Keep the Law and go thy way.
(Root and honey, palm and spathe,
Guard a cub from harm and scathe!)

Wood and Water, Wind and Tree,
Jungle-Favour go with thee!

[Kaa:] Anger is the egg of Fear--
Only lidless eyes see clear.
Cobra-poison none may leech--
Even so with Cobra-speech.
Open talk shall call to thee
Strength, whose mate is Courtesy.
Send no lunge beyond thy length.
Lend no rotten bough thy strength.
Gauge thy gape with buck or goat,
Lest thine eye should choke thy throat.
After gorging, wouldst thou sleep ?
Look thy den be hid and deep,
Lest a wrong, by thee forgot,
Draw thy killer to the spot.
East and West and North and South,
Wash thy hide and close thy mouth.
(Pit and rift and blue pool-brim,
Middle-Jungle follow him!)

Wood and Water, W ~ 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. The Dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild - as wild as wild could be - and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Or ever the knightly years were gone With the old world to the grave, ~ Rudyard Kipling

Cites and Thrones and Powers
Stand in Time's eye
Which daily die;
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spend and unconsidered Earth,
The cities will rise again ~ Rudyard Kipling

The Coppersmith is a bird who makes a noise exactly like the beating of a little hammer on a copper pot; and the reason he is always making it is because he is the town crier to every Indian garden, and tells all the news to everybody who cares to listen. ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

Whatever he knows of his weaknesses, Private Mulvaney is wholly ignorant of his strength. ~ Rudyard Kipling

As the dawn comes up like thunder. ~ Rudyard Kipling

And there's never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-three. ~ Rudyard Kipling

There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and woman to fill our day;
But when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers & Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Well, if I am a man, a man I must become. ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

All kinds of magic are out of date and done away with, except in India, where nothing changes in spite of the shiny, top-scum stuff that people call 'civilization. ~ Rudyard Kipling

We be of one blood, thou and I - ~ Rudyard Kipling

Each dog barks in its own yard. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Unappreciated because too many of his [Rudyard Kipling's] peers were socialists. ~ Jorge Luis Borges

I have my own matches and sulphur, and I'll make my own hell. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Kipling called it a very long conversation. ~ Lauren Groff

It was seven o'clock of a very warm evening in the Seeonee hills when Father Wolf woke up from his day's rest, scratched himself, yawned, and spread out his paws one after the other to get rid of the sleepy feeling in their tips. Mother Wolf lay with her big gray nose dropped across her four tumbling, squealing cubs, and the moon shone into the mouth of the cave where they all lived. "Augrh!" said Father Wolf. "It is time to hunt again." He was going to spring down hill when a little shadow with a bushy tail crossed the threshold and whined: "Good luck go with you, O Chief of the Wolves. And good luck and strong white teeth go with noble children that they may never forget the hungry in this world. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Lie still, little frog. O though Mowgli
for Mowgli the Frog I will call thee
the time will come when thought wilt hunt Shere Khan as he has hunted thee. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful!' and sitting in the shade. ~ Rudyard Kipling

For Kim did nothing with an immense success. ~ 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

As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race ... and the hearts of the meanest were humbled. ~ Rudyard Kipling

It's a sort of dull unhappiness that comes from isolation & blankness & monotony. It is quite different to the dullness & melancholia at home; I believe people have it sometimes in Kipling & it is, I think, in the air of the country. I went for a walk the other night by the side of the lagoon at sunset; the beauty of it was supreme with the bright green of the paddy fields, the masses of palms, the sky every shade of red & yellow, & the sea every shade of blue; but for all the brilliancy of colour there was a heavy melancholy over it all. ~ Leonard Woolf

The tiger's roar filled the cave with thunder. Mother Wolf shook herself clear of the cubs and sprang forward, her eyes, like two green moons in the darkness, facing the blazing eyes of Shere Khan. ~ Rudyard Kipling

As for the writers who have influenced me they are many. Hemingway, Chandler, Ray Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, William Goldman, Flannery O'Conner, Carson McCullers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and so many others. As a kid Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard. ~ Joe R. Lansdale

What stands if Freedom fail? What dies of England live? ~ Rudyard Kipling

For the sin they do by two and two they must pay for one by one. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Those who only know England know not England. ~ Rudyard Kipling

An angry skipper makes an unhappy crew. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The Bat sets free - The herds are shut in byre and hut For loosed till dawn ~ 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

Heaven grant us patience with a man in love. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Not getting what you want either means you don't want it enough, or you have been dealing too long with the price you have to pay. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Something is coming uphill," said Mother Wolf, twitching one ear. "Get ready." The bushes rustled a little in the thicket, and Father Wolf dropped with his haunches under him, ready for his leap. Then, if you had been watching, you would have seen the most wonderful thing in the world - the wolf checked in mid-spring. He made his bound before he saw what it was he was jumping at, and then he tried to stop himself. The result was that he shot up straight into the air for four or five feet, landing almost ~ Rudyard Kipling

He spent all that day roaming ~ 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

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

I've never sailed the Amazon,
I've never reached Brazil;
But the Don and Magdalena,
They can go there when they will!
Yes, weekly from Southampton,
Great steamers, white and gold,
Go rolling down to Rio
(Roll down - roll down to Rio!)
And I'd like to roll to Rio
Some day before I'm old!
I've never seen a Jaguar,
Nor yet an Armadill
O dilloing in his armour,
And I s'pose I never will,
Unless I go to Rio
These wonders to behold
Roll down - roll down to Rio
Roll really down to Rio!
Oh, I'd love to roll to Rio
Some day before I'm old! ~ Rudyard Kipling

A poem by Rudyard Kipling says derisively of people who despise soldiers and police that they make 'mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep.' You are likely to have a strong reaction pro or con to this sentiment and how Kipling expressed it, but you will not be able to defend your view with arguments that would convince someone who has the opposite reaction. If you are intellectually sophisticated you mare recognize that your conviction, however strong, cannot be shown to be 'right,' but at most reasonable. Yet that recognition will not weaken the strength of your conviction or its influence on your behavior." 105-06 (quoting Rudyard Kipling, Tommy.) ~ Richard A. Posner

When young lips have drunk deep of the bitter waters of hate, suspicion and despair, all the love in the world will not wholly take away that knowledge. Though it may turn darkened eyes for a while to the light, and teach faith where no faith was. ~ Rudyard Kipling

four tumbling, squealing cubs, ~ Rudyard Kipling

Bagheera to see if the Panther was angry too, and Bagheera's eyes were as hard as jade stones. "Thou hast been with the Monkey People
the gray apes
the people without a law
the eaters of everything. That is great shame." "When Baloo hurt my head," said Mowgli (he was still on his back), "I went away, and the gray ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

Roman Centurion's Song"

LEGATE, I had the news last night - my cohort ordered home
By ships to Portus Itius and thence by road to Rome.
I've marched the companies aboard, the arms are stowed below:
Now let another take my sword. Command me not to go!

I've served in Britain forty years, from Vectis to the Wall,
I have none other home than this, nor any life at all.
Last night I did not understand, but, now the hour draws near
That calls me to my native land, I feel that land is here.

Here where men say my name was made, here where my work was done;
Here where my dearest dead are laid - my wife - my wife and son;
Here where time, custom, grief and toil, age, memory, service, love,
Have rooted me in British soil. Ah, how can I remove?

For me this land, that sea, these airs, those folk and fields suffice.
What purple Southern pomp can match our changeful Northern skies,
Black with December snows unshed or pearled with August haze -
The clanging arch of steel-grey March, or June's long-lighted days?

You'll follow widening Rhodanus till vine and olive lean
Aslant before the sunny breeze that sweeps Nemausus clean
To Arelate's triple gate; but let me linger on,
Here where our stiff-necked British oaks confront Euroclydon!

You'll take the old Aurelian Road through shore-descending pines
Where, blue as any peacock's ne ~ Rudyard Kipling

There are few things sweeter in this world than the guileless, hotheaded,
intemperate, open admiration of a junior. Even a woman in
her blindest devotion does not fall into the gait of the man she
adores, tilt her bonnet to the angle at which he wears his hat, or
interlard her speech with his pet oaths. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Every man is entitled to his own religious opinions; but no man – least of all a junior – has a right to thrust these down other men's throats. ~ Rudyard Kipling

If men had not this delusion as to the ultra-importance of their own particular employments, I suppose that they would sit down and kill themselves. But their weakness is wearisome, particularly when the listener knows that he himself commits exactly the same sin. ~ Rudyard Kipling

There is no harm in a man's cub. ~ Rudyard Kipling

How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is eternally pestered by women? There was that girl at the Akrola by the Ford; and there was the scullion's wife behind the dovecote
not counting the others
and now comes this one! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man. Walnuts indeed! Ho! Ho! It is almonds in the Plains! ~ Rudyard Kipling

War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Too much work and too much energy kill a man just as effectively as too much assorted vice or too much drink ~ 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

The critic said that once a year he read Kim; and he read Kim, it was plain, at whim: not to teach, not to criticize, just for love - he read it, as Kipling wrote it, just because he liked to, wanted to, couldn't help himself. To him it wasn't a means to a lecture or article, it was an end; he read it not for anything he could get out of it, but for itself. And isn't this what the work of art demands of us? The work of art, Rilke said, says to us always: You must change your life. It demands of us that we too see things as ends, not as means - that we too know them and love them for their own sake. This change is beyond us, perhaps, during the active, greedy, and powerful hours of our lives; but duringthe contemplative and sympathetic hours of our reading, our listening, our looking, it is surely within our power, if we choose to make it so, if we choose to let one part of our nature follow its natural desires. So I say to you, for a closing sentence, Read at whim! read at whim! ~ Randall Jarrell

Like everything else in the world, it is one man's work. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The American has no language, he has a dialect, slang, provincialism, accent and so forth ~ Rudyard Kipling

For it's "guns this" and "guns that," and "chuck 'em out, the brutes," But they're the "Savior of our loved ones" when the thugs begin to loot. ~ Rudyard Kipling

If the aunt of the vicar has never touched liquor, watch out when she finds the Champagne. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Hear what little Red-Eye saith: Nag, come up and dance with death! ~ Rudyard Kipling

This is Burma and it is unlike any land you know about. ~ Rudyard Kipling

I am by nature a dealer in words, and words are the most powerful drug known to humanity. ~ 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

There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this. ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

I Keep Six Honest Serving Men ..."

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.

I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.

I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.

But different folk have different views;
I know a person small -
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!

She sends'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes -
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys! ~ Rudyard Kipling

I've taken my fun where I've found it. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Here the voice told him truthfully what sort of wife he had wedded, and what she was doing in his absence. ~ Rudyard Kipling

And the Eldest Magician said, 'How wise are little children who see and are silent! ~ Rudyard Kipling

If you've 'eard the East a-callin', why you won't 'eed nothin' else.
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else, but them spicy garlic smells, an' the sunshine an' the palm trees, an' the tinkly temple-bells. ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

God help us for we knew the worst too young. ~ Rudyard Kipling

I had come down here, not to serve God as a craftsman should, but to show my people how great a craftsman I was.
They cared not. ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order - never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which, perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous prostration. ~ Rudyard Kipling

And he grew and grew strong as a boy must grow who does not know that he is learning any lessons, and who has nothing in the world to think of except things to eat (23). ~ Rudyard Kipling

We be of one blood, ye and I ~ Rudyard Kipling

Mark my trail... ~ Rudyard Kipling

Meddling with another man's folly is always thankless work. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Darzee was a feather-brained little fellow who could never hold more than one idea at a time in his head. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Smells are surer than sounds and sights to make the heartstrings crack. ~ Rudyard Kipling

It is not a good fancy,' said the llama. 'What profit to kill men?'
Very little - as I know; but if evil men were not now and then slain it would not be a good world for weaponless dreamers. ~ Rudyard Kipling

All we have of freedom
All we use or know
This our fathers bought for us
Long and long ago ~ Rudyard Kipling

Who has delivered us, who? Tell me his nest and his name. Rikki, the valiant, the true, Tikki, with eyeballs of flame, Rikk-tikki-tikki, the ivory-fanged, the hunter with eyeballs of flame! ~ Rudyard Kipling

An intelligent man said that the world felt Napoleon as a weight, and that when he died it would give a great oof of relief. This is just as true of Byron, or of such Byrons of their days as Kipling and Hemingway: after a generation or two the world is tired of being their pedestal, shakes them of with an oof, and then hoisting onto its back a new world-figure feels the penetrating satisfaction of having made a mistake all its own. ~ Randall Jarrell

My heart is so tired ~ Rudyard Kipling

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

Many wear the robes, but few walk the Way. The Lama in Kim ~ Rudyard Kipling

So Mowgli went away and hunted with the four cubs in the jungle from that day on. But he was not always alone, because years afterward he became a man and married.

But that is a story for grown-ups. ~ Rudyard Kipling

One cannot resist the lure of Africa. ~ Rudyard Kipling

An increasing cackle of complaints, orders, and jests, and what to a European would have been bad language, came from behind the curtains. Here was evidently a woman used to command. ~ Rudyard Kipling

When a man does good work out of all proportion to his pay, in seven cases out of nine there is a woman at the back of the virtue.
The two exceptions must have suffered from sunstroke. ~ Rudyard Kipling

The python dropped his head lightly for a moment on Mowgli's shoulders. "A brave heart and a courteous tongue," said he. "They shall carry thee far through the jungle, manling. But now go hence quickly with thy friends. Go and sleep, for the moon sets and what follows it is not well that thou shouldst see. ~ Rudyard Kipling

My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers - it's what my children call my 'dead author wall.' I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few. ~ Debbie Macomber

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

Madness is the most disgraceful thing that can overtake a wild creature. ~ Rudyard Kipling

Kipling: Where's your sense of humor?
Rebis: We're working on reconstructing it ... ~ Grant Morrison

These two things fight together in me as the snakes fight in the spring. The water comes out of my eyes; yet I laugh while it falls. Why? ~ Rudyard Kipling