Rudyard Kipling Quotes

1865–1936 England

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.

England
Hymnwriters
Journalists
Nobel laureates
Novelists

Also known as: Joseph Rudyard Kipling, Kipling, Kipling, Rudyard, R. Kipling

Random Rudyard Kipling quote

173 quotes

Kim marked down a gaily ornamented ruth or family bullock cart, with a broidered canopy of two domes, like a double humped camel, which had just been drawn into the par. Eight men made its retinue and two of eight were armed with rusty sabres, sure signs they followed a person of distinction, for the common folk do not bear arms.

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.

The Five Nations (1903)

To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned,
To my brethren in their sorrow overseas,
Sings a gentleman of England cleanly bred, machinely crammed,
And a trooper of the Empress, if you please.

Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

Tho 'eathen in 'is blindness bows down to wood an' stone;
'E don't obey no orders unless they is 'is own;
'E keeps 'is side-arms awful: 'e leaves 'em all about,
An' then comes up the Regiment an' pokes the 'eathen out.

You may talk o' gin and beer
When you're quartered safe out 'ere,
An' you're sent to penny-fights an' Aldershot it;
But when it comes to slaughter
You will do your work on water,
An' you'll lick the bloomin' boots of 'im that's got it.

Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

A Nation spoke to a Nation,
A Queen sent word to a Throne:
‘Daughter am I in my mother's house,
But mistress in my own.
The gates are mine to open,
As the gates are mine to close,
And I set my house in order,'
Said our Lady of the Snows.

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!

Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose
Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,
Such boastings as the Gentiles use,
Or lesser breeds without the Law —
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Departmental Ditties and other Verses (1886)

Her plates are scarred by the sun, dear lass,
And her ropes are taut with the dew,
For we're booming down on the old trail, our own trail, the out trail.
We're sagging south on the Long Trail, the trail that is always new.

For agony and spoil
Of nations beat to dust,
For poisoned air and tortured soil
And cold, commanded lust,
And every secret woe
The shuddering waters saw—
Willed and fulfilled by high and low—
Let them relearn the Law.

We aren't no thin red 'eroes, nor we aren't no blackguards too,
But single men in barricks, most remarkable like you;
An' if sometimes our conduck isn't all your fancy paints,
Why, single men in barricks don't grow into plaster saints.

Barrack-Room Ballads (1892)

But that's another story.

When the flush of a new-born sun fell first on Eden's green and gold,
Our father Adam sat under the Tree and scratched with a stick in the mould;
And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart,
Till the Devil whispered behind the leaves, “It's pretty, but is it Art?”

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Rudyard Kipling (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.