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.

From: Wikiquote (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Birth Name: Joseph Rudyard Kipling

Alternative Names: R. Kipling • Kipling

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

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

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!

Cities and Thrones and Powers,
Stand in Time's eye,
Almost as long as flowers,
Which daily die:
But, as new buds put forth
To glad new men,
Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,
The Cities rise again.

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.

Yet instant to fore-shadowed need ⁠The eternal balance swings; ⁠That winged men the Fates may breed ⁠So soon as Fate hath wings. ⁠⁠These shall possess ⁠⁠Our littleness, ⁠And in the imperial task (as worthy) lay ⁠Up our lives' all to piece one giant day.

Before the years reborn behold ⁠Themselves with stranger eye, ⁠And the sport-making Gods of old, ⁠Like Samson slaying, die, ⁠⁠Many shall hear ⁠⁠The all-pregnant sphere, ⁠Bow to the birth and sweat, but — speech denied — ⁠Sit dumb or — dealt in part — fall weak and wide.

Ye know who use the Crystal Ball ⁠(To peer by stealth on Doom), ⁠The Shade that, shaping first of all, ⁠⁠Prepares an empty room. ⁠⁠⁠Then doth It pass ⁠⁠⁠Like breath from glass, ⁠But, on the extorted vision bowed intent, ⁠No man considers why It came or went.

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

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.

When the cabin port-holes are dark and green
Because of the seas outside;
When the ship goes wop (with a wiggle between)
And the steward falls into the soup-tureen,
And the trunks begin to slide;
When Nursey lies on the floor in a heap,
And Mummy tells you to let her sleep,
And you aren't waked or washed or dressed,
Why, then you will know (if you haven't guessed)
You're ‘Fifty North and Forty West!'

When you've shouted "Rule Brittania": when you've sung "God Save the Queen,"
When you've finished killing Kruger with your mouth,
Will you kindly drop a shilling in my little tambourine
For a gentleman in khaki headed South?

Take up the White Man's burden-- In patience to abide, To veil the threat of terror, And check the show of pride; By open speech and simple, An hundred times made plain To seek another's profit, And work another's gain. The White Man's Burden, Stanza 2 (1899).

Take up the White Man's burden-- Send forth the best ye breed-- Go bind your sons to exile, To serve your captives' need; To wait in heavy harness, On fluttered folk and wild-- Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child. The White Man's Burden, Stanza 1 (1899).

And only the Master shall praise us, and only the Master shall blame;
And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame,
But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star,
Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They Are!