Rudyard Kipling Quotes

I keep six honest serving men (they taught me all i knew); Theirs names are What and Why and When And How And Where and Who.

For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

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

Take everything you like seriously, except yourselves.

Now this is the Law of the Jungle — as old and as true as the sky; And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree-trunk the Law runneth forward and back — For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.

This is a brief life, but in its brevity it offers us some splendid moments, some meaningful adventures.

There is no sin greater than ignorance.

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.

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

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.

No printed word, nor spoken plea can teach young minds what they should be. Not all the books on all the shelves - but what the teachers are themselves.

All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.

The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same.

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

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

If any Question why We Died Tell them because our Father's Lied.

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

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.

There's no jealousy in the grave.

If you hit a pony over the nose at the outset of your acquaintance, he may not love you but he will take a deep interest in your movements ever afterwards

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

Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.

He is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew to serve your turn long after they are gone, and so hold on when there is nothing in you except the will which says to them: 'Hold on!'

Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

A people always ends by resembling its shadow.

Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbours.

A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.

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.

If you want something and don't get it, there are only two reasons. You either really didn't want it, or you tried to bargain over the price.

It's clever, but is it Art?

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

Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.

Take up the White Man's burden — send forth the best ye breed — go, bind your sons to exile to serve your captives need.

There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right.

And the end of the fight is tombstone white with the name of the late deceased, and the epitaph drear, "A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East."

If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!

It's Tommy this, and Tommy that, and 'chuck 'im out, the brute,' But it's 'Savior of his Country,' When the guns begin to shoot!

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 tired youths and maids that feign to love or sin in tones like rusty razor blades to tunes like smitten tin.