Rudyard Kipling Quotes - Page 5

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.

When a crew and a captain understand each other to the core, it takes a gale, and more than a gale, to put their ship ashore.

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, But make allowance for their doubting too;!

Literature is a splendid mistress, but a bad wife.

O it's Tommy this, and Tommy that, and Tommy 'ow's your soul/But it's thin red line of heroes when the drums begin to roll.

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."

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?'

Ah! What avails the classic bent And what the cultured word, Against the undoctored incident That actually occurred? And what is Art whereto we press Through paint and prose and rhyme- When Nature in her nakedness Defeats us every time?

Now India is a place beyond all others where one must not take things too seriously—the midday sun always excepted.

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

I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.

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

Politics are not my concern.... They impressed me as a dog's life without a dog's decencies.

He became an officer and a gentleman, which is an enviable thing.

One cannot resist the lure of Africa.

Till the master of all good workmen shall set us to work anew.

We're poor little lambs who've lost our way, Baa! Baa! Baa! We're little black sheep who've gone astray, Baa-aa-aa! Gentlemen-rankers out on the spree, Damned from here to Eternity, God ha' mercy on such as we, Baa! Yah! Bah!

The American does not drink at meals as a sensible man should. Indeed, he has no meals. He stuffs for ten minutes thrice a day.

The Navy is very old and very wise.

Oh, Adam was a gardener, and God who made him sees That half a proper gardener's work is done upon his knees, So when your work is finished, you can wash your hands and pray For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!

I've taken my fun where I've found it.

Cities and Thrones and Powers Stand in Time's eye, Almost as long as flowers, Which daily die

Buy a pup and your money will buy Love unflinching that cannot lie.

We never pay anyone Dane-geld, No matter how trifling the cost; For the end of that game is oppression and shame, And the nation that plays it is lost!

The cat will keep his side of the bargain. He will kill mice, and he will be kind to babies when he is in the house, just so long as they do not pull his tail too hard. But when he has done that, and between times, and when the moon gets up and night comes, he is the Cat that walks by himself, and all places are alike to him. Then he goes out to the Wet Wild Woods or up on the Wet Wild trees or on the Wet Wild roofs, waving his wild tail and walking by his wild lone.