Top 400 Rudyard Kipling Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “Hsh! He is asleep. We will not wake him, for his strength is very great. The kites have come down to see it. The black ants have come up to know it. There is a great assembly in his honor.”

— Rudyard Kipling

402. “He is a man – a man – a man!” snarled the Pack; and most of the wolves began to gather round Shere Khan, whose tail was beginning to switch.”

— Rudyard Kipling

403. “Wolf Pack, ye have cast me out too. The jungle is shut to me and the village gates are shut. Why?”

— Rudyard Kipling

404. “I say in my heart the Faiths are like the horses. Each has merit in its own country.”

— Rudyard Kipling

405. “No jury, we knew, could convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all complete for fifty-four rupees.”

— Rudyard Kipling

406. “Waters of the Waingunga, Shere Khan gives me his coat for the love that he bears me. Pull, Gray Brother! Pull, Akela! Heavy is the hide of Shere Khan.”

— Rudyard Kipling

407. “Waingunga, the Man Pack have.”

— Rudyard Kipling

408. “Alala! I have no cloth to wrap me. The kites will see that I am naked. I am ashamed to meet all these people.”

— Rudyard Kipling

409. “Bagheera told him that he must never touch cattle because he had been bought into the Pack at the price of a bull’s life.”

— Rudyard Kipling

410. “Rikk-tikk-tikki-tikki-tchk!”

— Rudyard Kipling

411. “Very foolish it is to use the wrong word to a stranger; for though the heart may be clean of offence, how is the stranger to know that? He is more like to search truth with a dagger.”

— Rudyard Kipling

412. “As Mang flies between the beasts and birds, so fly I between the village and the jungle. Why?”

— Rudyard Kipling

413. “Mowgli will drive Mowgli. Go back to thy people. Go to man. -Akela.”

— Rudyard Kipling

414. “Then says Mrs. Hauksbee to me – she looked a trifle faded and jaded in the lamplight: “Take my word for it, the silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.”

— Rudyard Kipling

415. “Ow! He is there. Ahoo! He is there. Under the feet of Rama lies the Lame One! Up, Shere Khan! Up and kill! Here is meat; break the necks of the bulls!”

— Rudyard Kipling

416. “You’ll be beaten for this in the morning; but I may as well give you something on account now.”

— Rudyard Kipling

417. “This talk went in at one ear and out at the other, for a boy who spends his life eating and sleeping does not worry about anything till it actually stares him in the face. But, one year, Baloo’s words came true, and Mowgli saw all the Jungle working under the Law.”

— Rudyard Kipling

418. “If any Question why We Died Tell them because our Father’s Lied.”

— Rudyard Kipling

419. “Which homily brings me directly to a brace of the most finished little fiends that ever banged drum or tootled fife in the Band of a British Regiment. They ended their sinful career by open and flagrant mutiny and were shot for it. Their names were Jakin and Lew – Piggy Lew and they were bold, bad drummer-boys, both of them frequently birched by the Drum-Major of the Fore and Aft.”

— Rudyard Kipling

420. “Every old ruin in India becomes sooner or later a dwelling place of snakes, and the old summer-house was alive with cobras.”

— Rudyard Kipling

421. “Bring up the great bull-buffaloes, the blue-skinned herd-bulls with the angry eyes. Drive them to and fro as I order.”

— Rudyard Kipling

422. “Waters of the Waingunga, the Man Pack have cast me out. I did them no harm, but they were afraid of me. Why?”

— Rudyard Kipling

423. “Madden, from the pantry, rose to the crisis like a butler and a man.”

— Rudyard Kipling

424. “Here I am,” yapped Vixen, “under the gun-tail with my man. You big, blundering beast of a camel you, you upset our tent. My man’s very angry.” “Phew!” said the bullocks. “He must be white?”

— Rudyard Kipling

425. “But say, India’s half the size of the United States. Which State are you going to?”

— Rudyard Kipling

426. “Baloo and Bagheera, for, at the pace the monkeys were going, he knew his friends would be left far behind. It was useless to look down, for he could only see the top sides of the branches, so he stared upward and saw, far away in the blue, Rann, the Kite, balancing and wheeling.”

— Rudyard Kipling

427. “There is no pride,’ said the lama, after a pause, ’there is no pride among such as follow the Middle Way.”

— Rudyard Kipling

428. “The Viceroy possessed no name – nothing but a string of counties and two-thirds of the alphabet after them.”

— Rudyard Kipling

429. “All the jungle knows that I have killed Shere Khan. Look – look well, O Wolves!”

— Rudyard Kipling

430. “Men had been puffed up with pride by notions not a tithe as excellent and practicable.”

— Rudyard Kipling

431. “The Man Pack are angry. They throw stones and talk child’s talk. My mouth is bleeding. Let me run away.”

— Rudyard Kipling

432. “The Sahibs have not all this world’s wisdom.”

— Rudyard Kipling

433. “He is not Ikki to dig holes, nor Mao, the Peacock, that he should fly. He is not Mang the Bat, to hang in the branches. Little bamboos that creak together, tell me where he ran?”

— Rudyard Kipling

434. “Returning, it was noticeable, as his friend the Seeker pointed out to the head-priest, that he ceased for a while to mourn the loss of his River, or to draw wondrous pictures of the Wheel of Life, but preferred to talk of the beauty and wisdom of a certain mysterious chela whom no man of the temple had ever seen.”

— Rudyard Kipling