Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936) was an English journalist, short-story writer, poet, and novelist. Kipling spent the first years of his life in India, which inspired much of his work. At the age of five, as was the custom in British India, he and his three-year-old sister were sent to a boarding house in the United Kingdom to begin their schooling. Following several unhappy years there, Kipling returned to India in 1882 to work as a journalist. In March of 1889 Kipling left India to return to England where he quickly rose to fame. In 1894 his Jungle Book was released, which became a children’s classic all over the world. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907.
Quotes by Rudyard Kipling…
What you do when you don’t have to determines what you will be, when you can no longer help it.
If
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;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss[ess];
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!