Top 307 Quotes & Sayings by Rudyard Kipling - Page 5

No doubt but ye are the People - absolute, strong and wise; Whatever your hear has desired ye have not withheld from your eyes. On your own heads, in your own hands, the sin and the saving lies!

Still stands thine ancient sacrifice - An humble and a contrite heart.

Hear and attend and listen; for this is what befell and be-happened and became and was, O my Best Beloved, when the Tame animals were wild. The dog was wild, and the Horse was wild, and the Cow was wild, and the Sheep was wild, and the Pig was wild -as wild as wild could be - and they walked in the Wet Wild Woods by their wild lones. But the wildest of all the wild animals was the Cat. He walked by himself and all places were alike to him

Of course the Man was wild too. He was dreadfully wild. He didn't even begin to be tame till he met the Woman, and she told him that she did not like living in his wild ways. She picked out a nice dry Cave, instead of a heap of wet leaves, to lie down in; and she strewed clean sand on the floor; and she lit a nice fire of wood at the back of the Cave; and she hung a dried wild-horse skin, tail down, across the opening of the Cave; and she said, 'Wipe your feet, dear, when you come in, and now we'll keep house.

I wasted my substance, I know I did, on riotous living, so I did, but there's nothing on record to show I did more than my betters have done.

None of the Jungle People like being disturbed.

Your new-caught, sullen peoples, / Half-devil and half child.

Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears.

I had never seen the jungle. They fed me behind bars from an iron pan till one night I felt that I was Bagheera - the Panther - and no man's plaything, and I broke the silly lock with one blow of my paw and came away; and because I had learned the ways of men, I became more terrible in the jungle than Shere Khan.

'E's all'ot sand an' ginger when alive, An''e's generally shammin' when'e's dead.

God help us for we knew the worst too young.

Good Lord! who can account for the fathomless folly of the public?

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.

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

And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins, when all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins.

Youth had been a habit of hers for so long that she could not part with it.

Something I owe to the soil that grew-More to the life that fed-But most to Allah who gave me two Separate sides of my head. I would go without shirt or shoes, Friends, tobacco, or bread Sooner than for an instant lose Either side of my head.

But he couldn't lie if you paid him and he'd starve before he stole.

Once there was The People - Terror gave it birth.

After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food.

Shere Khan, the Big One, has shifted his hunting grounds. He will hunt among these hills for the next moon, so he has told me.

If a man brings a good mind to what he reads he may become, as it were, the spiritual descendant to some extent of great men, and this link, this spiritual hereditary tie, may help to just kick the beam in the right direction at a vital crisis; or may keep him from drifting through the long slack times when, so to speak, we are only fielding and no balls are coming our way.

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be many.

Though our smoke may hide the Heavens from your eyes, It will vanish and the stars will shine again, Because, for all our power and weight and size, We are nothing more than children of your brain!

What is the moral? Who rides may read.

When man has come to the Turnstiles of Night, all the creeds in the world seem to him wonderfully alike and colorless.

What is a woman that you forsake her, And the hearth-fire and the home-acre, To go with the old grey Widow-maker?

She is intensely human, and lives to look upon life.

Hear and attend and listen; for this befell and behappened and became and was: O my Best Beloved, when the tame animals were wild.

The motto of all the mongoose family is, "Run and find out," and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose.

Body and spirit I surrendered whole To harsh instructors and received a soul... If mortal man could change me through and through From all I was What may the God not do?

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.

Twenty bridges from Tower to Kew — (Twenty bridges or twenty two) — Wanted to know what the River knew, For they were young, and the Thames was old And this is the tale that River told.

Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!

Call a truce, then, to our labors - let us feast with friends and neighbors, and be merry as the custom of our caste; for if ''faint and forced the laughter,'' and if sadness follow after, we are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

A boy of to-day is affected by every change of tone and gust of opinion, so that he lies even when he desires to speak the truth.

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

The Three in One, the One in Three? Not so! To my own Gods I go. It may be they shall give me greater ease than your cold Christ and tangled Trinities.

Adam was a gardener, and God, who made him, sees that half of all good gardening is done upon the knees.

There is sorrow enough in the natural way From men and woman to fill our day; But when we are certain of sorrow in store, Why do we always arrange for more? Brothers & Sisters, I bid you beware Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.

Men, not children or servants, tempered and taught to the end; Cleansed of servile panic, slow to dread or despise, Humble because of knowledge, mighty by sacrifice.

But till we are built like angels, with hammer and chisel and pen, we will work for ourself and a woman, forever and ever, Amen.

Fiction is Truth's elder sister. Obviously. No one in the world knew what truth was till some one had told a story.

The beasts are very wise, Their mouths are clean of lies, They talk one to the other, Bullock to bullock brothers Resting after their labors, Each in stall with his neighbors, But man with goad and whip, Breaks up their fellowship, Shouts in their silky ears Filling their soul with fears. When he has plowed the land, He says: "they understand." But the beasts in stall together, Freed from the yoke and tether, Say as the torn flank smoke: "Nay, 'twas the whip that spoke."

Let all who build beware The load, the shock, the pressure Material can bear. So, when the buckled girder Lets down the grinding span, The blame of loss, or murder, Is laid upon the man. Not on the Stuff - the Man!

You perceive, do you not, that our national fairy tales reflect the inmost desires of the Briton and the Gaul?

They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods

The 'eathen in 'is blindness must end where 'e began. But the backbone of the Army is the non-commissioned man!

The heart of a man to the heart of a maid- Light of my tents, be fleet- Morning awaits at the end of the world, And the world is all at our feet.

The white moth to the closing vine, The bee to the open clover, And the Gypsy blood to the Gypsy blood Ever the wide world over.

We have learned to whittle the Eden Tree to the shape of a surplice peg, We have learned to bottle our parents twain in the yelk of an addled egg. We know that the tail must wag the dog, for the horse is drawn by the cart, But the devil whoops, as he whooped of old; It's clever, but is it art?

Brother, thy tail hangs down behind.

We have done with Hope and Honour. we are lost to Love and Truth, We are dropping down the ladder rung by rung; And the measure of our torment is the measure of our youth. God help us, for we knew the worst too young!

No one as yet has approached the management of New York in a proper spirit; that is to say, regarding it as the shiftless outcome of squalid barbarism and reckless extravagance. No one is likely to do so, because reflections on the long narrow pig-trough are construed as malevolent attacks against the spirit and majesty of the American people, and lead to angry comparisons.

Gentleman-rankers out on the spree, damned from here to Eternity.

And the talk slid north, and the talk slid south With the sliding puffs from the hookah-mouth; Four things greater than all things are Women and Horses and Power and War.

A tale from which pieces have been raked out is like a fire that has been poked. One does not know the operation has been performed, but everyone feels the effect.

The toad beneath the harrow knows Exactly where each tooth point goes.

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back and forth against the blue sky.

It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart, and sends you to breakfast ravening.