Joseph Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936) was a British novelist, short-story writer, and poet. This winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (1907) published more than two hundred works of poetry and prose.
Born in Bombay, India, where his father taught art, Kipling grew up in England. He returned to India and became a journalist for the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette. His experience of the diversity of life in colonial India during the glory days of the British Raj inspired his popular poems and short stories.
Kipling is well known for poems such as “If” and “Gunga Din,” and for his children’s tales, mainly The Jungle Book (1894) and Just So Stories (1902.) His support of English imperialism contributed to this popularity at first, but became out of favor in the 20th century.
Kipling is regarded as one of the greatest English writers of the short story. He influenced T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, and Jorge Luis Borges. Kipling’s autobiography, Something of Myself, remained unfinished.
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O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy go away”;
But it’s “Thank you, Mister Atkins,” when the band begins to play-
The band begins to play, my boys, the band begins to play,
O it’s “Thank you Mr Atkins,” when the band begins to play.
—Rudyard Kipling
If you can make one heap of all your winnings And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss, And lose, and start again at your beginnings And never breathe a word about your loss; You’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
God gives all men all earth to love, but since man’s heart is small, ordains for each one spot shall prove beloved over all.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Travel
If you can keep you head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you. If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; You’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master; If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim; If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat these two imposters just the same; You’ll be a man my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies, Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise: You’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
Four things greater than all things are, Women and Horses and Power and War.
—Rudyard Kipling
Pleasant the snaffle of courtship, improving the manners and carriage; but the colt who is wise will abstain from the terrible throw bit of Marriage.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Marriage
A Nation spoke to a Nation,
A Queen sent word to a Throne:”Daughter am I in my mothers 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.
—Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you… . The world will be yours and everything in it, what’s more, you’ll be a man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools, Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken, And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools: you’ll be a Man, my son.
—Rudyard Kipling
All we have of freedom — all we use or know — this our fathers bought for us, long and long ago.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Freedom
More men are killed by overwork than the importance of the world justifies.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Work
What you do when you don’t have to determines what you will be when you can no longer help it.
—Rudyard Kipling
He wrapped himself in quotations — as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
—Rudyard Kipling
Topics: Knowledge, Quotations
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