Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936) was a great story-teller and poet, a Nobel Prize-winning English author who became famous for his novel "Kim". He was born in Bombay, and educated in England. He went out to India as a journalist. His stories respect Anglo-Indian, and especially military, life in India, and his "Soldiers Three," with the rest that followed, such as "Wee Willie Winkie," gained for him an immediate and wide reputation. As a poet, his most successful effort is his "Barrack-Room Ballads," instinct with a martial spirit, in 1864. He was a writer of conspicuous realistic power. He deems it the mission of civilisation to drill the savage races in humanity.

Wisdom & Quotes

• The Cat. He walked by himself, and all places were alike to him.

- The Cat That Walked by Himself

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

- The Betrothed in Departmental Ditties

• The female of the species is more deadly than the male.

- The Female of the Species

• If once you have paid him the Dane-geld

You never get rid of the Dane.
- Dane-geld

• Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,

Where there aren't no Ten Commandments, an' a man can raise a thirst.
- Mandalay

• For the Colonel's lady an' Judy O'Grady

Are sisters under their skins!
- The Ladies

• Four things greater than all things are, -

Women and Horses and Power and War.
- The Ballad of the King's Jest

• What stands if freedom fall?

- For All We Have and Are

• You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

- Gunga Din

• If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you
And make allowance for their doubting, too.
- If

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

- If

• If you can talk with crowds and keep your virture

Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch.
- If

• If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!
- If

• Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget - lest we forget.
- Recessional

• Everyone is more or less mad on the point.

- On the Strength of a Likeness in Plain Tales from the Hills

• A fool there was and he made his prayer

(Even as you and I!)
To a rag and a bone and a hank of hair
(We called her the woman who did not care)
But the fool he called her his lady fair -
Even as you and I.
- The Vampire

• Teach us delight in simple things,

And mirth that has no bitter springs.
- The Children's Song

• He travels fastest who travels alone.

- The Winners

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

- Three and - an Extra in Plain Tales from the Hills

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

- The Phantom 'Rickshaw

Logan Pearsall Smith