Rudyard Kipling Quotes

English writer and poet (1865–1936)

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Joseph Rudyard Kipling (30 December 1865 – 18 January 1936) was an English short-story writer, poet, novelist and journalist, born in India. In 1907, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English language writer to receive it. He remains, over a century later, its youngest-ever recipient.

Bio from: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Alternative Names: R. Kipling • Kipling

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Five and twenty ponies
Trotting through the dark—
Brandy for the Parson,
'Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn't told a lie—
Watch the wall, my darling, while the gentlemen go by!

I keep six honest serving-men:
(They taught me all I knew)
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who.

But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole shrine he came, And he told me in a vision of the night:—
There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
And every single one of them is right!

I am the Cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State,
They arrive at their conclusions—largely inarticulate.
Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none:
But sometimes in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done.

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

We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there's never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead.

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!

Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.

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

I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

We pulled for you when the wind was against us and the sails were low.
Will you never let us go?

If you can wait and not be tired of 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.

Take of English earth as much
As either hand may rightly clutch.
In the taking of it breathe
Prayer for all who lie beneath.

I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?