Rudyard Kipling Quotes

English writer and poet (1865–1936)

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.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Alternative Names: R. Kipling • Kipling

From Wikidata (CC0)

More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.

Down to Gehenna or up to the Throne,
He travels the fastest who travels alone.

There rise her timeless capitals of Empires daily born,
Whose plinths are laid at midnight, and whose streets are packed at morn;
And here come hired youths and maids that feign to love or sin
In tones like rusty razor-blades to tunes like smitten tin.

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!

But remember, please, the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive,
If you make a slip in handling us you die!
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—
Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!—
Our touch can alter all created things,
We are everything on earth—except The Gods!

Now I possess and am possessed of the land where I would be,
And the curve of half Earth's generous breast shall soothe and ravish me!

We and They, Stanza 1.

Father, Mother, and Me,
Sister and Auntie say
All the people like us are We,
And every one else is They.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees
That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees,
So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray
For the Glory of the Garden that it may not pass away!

There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,
Or the way of a man with a maid;
But the fairest way to me is a ship's upon the sea
In the heel of the North-East Trade.

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

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

When your Daemon is in charge, do not try to think consciously. Drift, wait, and obey.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

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