Top 400 Rudyard Kipling Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “If you can think–and not make thoughts your aim.”

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

104. “These are the four that are never content: that have never been filled since the dew began- Jacala’s mouth, and the glut of the kite, and the hands of the ape, and the eyes of Man.”

— Rudyard Kipling

105. “There are nine-and-sixty ways of constructing tribal lays, And every single one of them is right.”

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

107. “As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn, The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

109. “Ye may kill for yourselves, and your mates, and your cubs as they need, and ye can; But kill not for pleasure of killing, and seven times never kill Man!”

— Rudyard Kipling

110. “If you don’t get what you want, it’s a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.”

— Rudyard Kipling

111. “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.”

— Rudyard Kipling

112. “Down to Gehenna or up to the thrown, he Travels the fastest who travels alone.”

— Rudyard Kipling

113. “To hear is one thing, to know is another.”

— Rudyard Kipling

114. “One cannot resist the lure of Africa.”

— Rudyard Kipling

115. “Smells are surer than sounds and sights to make the heartstrings crack.”

— Rudyard Kipling

116. “This, O my Best Beloved is a story – a new and wonderful story – a story quite different from the other stories.”

— Rudyard Kipling

117. “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!”

— Rudyard Kipling

118. “Being kissed by a man who didn’t wax his moustache was-like eating an egg without salt.”

— Rudyard Kipling

119. “But remember please, the Law by which we live, we are not built to comprehend a lie, we can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die.”

— Rudyard Kipling

120. “We be of one blood, ye and I.”

— Rudyard Kipling

121. “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.”

— Rudyard Kipling

122. “And no one shall work for money, and no one shall work for fame, But each for the joy of the working, and each, in his separate star, Shall draw the Thing as he sees It for the God of Things as They are!”

— Rudyard Kipling

123. “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.”

— Rudyard Kipling

124. “Follow the dream, and always the dream, and only the dream.”

— Rudyard Kipling

125. “I’ve a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!”

— Rudyard Kipling

126. “A thin grey fog hung over the city, and the streets were very cold; for summer was in England.”

— Rudyard Kipling

127. “Slowly – slowly. It was haste killed the Yellow Snake that ate the sun.”

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

129. “San Francisco is a mad city – inhabited for the most part by perfectly insane people whose women are of a remarkable beauty.”

— Rudyard Kipling

130. “Not getting what you want either means you don’t want it enough, or you have been dealing too long with the price you have to pay.”

— Rudyard Kipling

131. “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

— Rudyard Kipling

132. “Now Rann the Kite brings home the night That Mang the Bat sets free –.”

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

134. “I have no gift of words, but I speak the truth.”

— Rudyard Kipling

135. “He who faces no calamity gains no courage.”

— Rudyard Kipling

136. “Go softly by that river side Or when you would depart, You’ll find its every winding tied; And knotted round your heart.”

— Rudyard Kipling

137. “How can a man follow the Way or the Great Game when he is eternally pestered by women? There was that girl at the Akrola by the Ford; and there was the scullion’s wife behind the dovecote – not counting the others – and now comes this one! When I was a child it was well enough, but now I am a man and they will not regard me as a man. Walnuts indeed! Ho! Ho! It is almonds in the Plains!”

— Rudyard Kipling

138. “Well, if I am a man, a man I must become.”

— Rudyard Kipling

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

— Rudyard Kipling

140. “Favouritism governed kissage, Even as it does in this age.”

— Rudyard Kipling

141. “No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”

— Rudyard Kipling

142. “The world is very lovely, and it’s very horrible – and it doesn’t care about your life or mine or anything else.”

— Rudyard Kipling

143. “None of the Jungle People like being disturbed.”

— Rudyard Kipling

144. “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!”

— Rudyard Kipling

145. “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?”

— Rudyard Kipling

146. “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?’”

— Rudyard Kipling

147. “And when your back stops aching and your hands begin to harden, You will find yourself a partner in the Glory of the Garden.”

— Rudyard Kipling

148. “A black shadow dropped down into the circle. It was Bagheera the Black Panther, inky black all over, but with the panther markings showing up in certain lights like the pattern of watered silk. Everybody knew Bagheera, and nobody cared to cross his path, for he was as cunning as Tabaqui, as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant. But he had a voice as soft as wild honey dripping from a tree, and a skin softer than down.”

— Rudyard Kipling

149. “Satan himself can’t save a woman who wears thirty-shilling corsets under a thirty-guinea costume.”

— Rudyard Kipling

150. “Any fool can waste, any fool can muddle, but it takes something of a man to save, and the more he saves the more of a man does it make of him.”

— Rudyard Kipling