Tao Te Ching
DEA Picture Library
Rudyard Kipling
1865 – 1936 CE
Greatest—in-English—short-story writer
Journalist, poet, novelist, major short story writing innovator, youngest and first Englishman to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature; Kipling was born in India and quickly became one of the most popular prose and verse writers of his era. Accused by critics of racism, misogyny, and imperialism; George Orwell believed that Kipling sold his soul to the British, colonial establishment and he did support a military figure responsible for a massacre. A contemporary Indian writer said he had a much better understanding of animals than of the Indian people he wrote about. However, his fame endures, his children’s books remain popular classics, his poetry is still being recorded, his adult fiction is still in print, and his deep influence on Scouting movements continues.
Lineages
British Historians / Journalists Poets
Eras
Western
Post-Romantic Age (1850 – 2018 CE)Gilded Age (1860 – 1900 CE)
Great Depression (1929 – 1941 CE)
Victorian (1837 – 1901 CE)
Roaring Twenties (1920 – 1929 CE)
Chinese
Qing dynasty (1644 – 1912 CE)Unlisted Sources
Collected Works
If—
Kim
Plain Tales from the Hills
Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
The Ballad of East and West
The Light That Failed
Under The Deodars
Quotes by Rudyard Kipling (16 quotes)
“Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgement Seat; But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth, when two strong men stand face to face, though they come from the ends of the earth!”
from The Ballad of East and West
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“Me, in whose breast no flame hath burned
Life-long, save that by Pindar lit.”
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“I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”
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“I always prefer to believe the best of everybody; it saves so much trouble”
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“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
from The Light That Failed
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“A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.”
from Plain Tales from the Hills
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“There is no sin so great as ignorance. Remember this.”
from Kim
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“War is an ill thing, as I surely know. But 'twould be an ill world for weaponless dreamers if evil men were not now and then slain.”
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“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is hard business. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.”
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“Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are our own fears.”
from Collected Works
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“I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn't explain away afterwards.”
from Under The Deodars
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“If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”
from If—
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“If you can dream—and not make dreams your master… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”
from If—
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“If you can lose, and start again at your beginnings and never breathe a word about your loss;… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it”
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“If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you or, being lied about, don’t deal in lies, or, being hated, don’t give way to hating,… Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it.”
from If—
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“Teach us Delight in simple things,
And Mirth that has no bitter springs.”
from Puck of Pook's Hill (1906)
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Quotes about Rudyard Kipling (5 quotes)
“Kipling strikes me personally as the most complete man of genius, as distinct from fine intelligence, that I have ever known.”
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“An immense gift for using words, an amazing curiosity and power of observation with his mind and with all his senses, the mask of the entertainer, and beyond that a queer gift of second sight, of transmitting messages from elsewhere, a gift so disconcerting when we are made aware of it that thenceforth we are never sure when it is not present: all this makes Kipling a writer impossible wholly to understand and quite impossible to belittle.”
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“[Kipling] is still an author who can inspire passionate disagreement and his place in literary and cultural history is far from settled. But as the age of the European empires recedes, he is recognized as an incomparable, if controversial, interpreter of how empire was experienced. That, and an increasing recognition of his extraordinary narrative gifts, make him a force to be reckoned with.”
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“After you have read Kipling's fifty or seventy-five best stories you realize that few men have written this many stories of this much merit, and that very few have written more and better stories.”
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“A jingo imperialist, morally insensitive, and aesthetically disgusting, and although every enlightened person has despised him ... nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there... He dealt largely in platitudes, and since we live in a world of platitudes, much of what he said sticks.”
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