Rudyard Kipling quotes

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!

He whistled with surprise when he saw Mowgli being dragged up to a treetop and heard him give the Kite call for--“We be of one blood, thou and I.” The waves of the branches closed over the boy, but Rann balanced away to the next tree in time to see the little brown face come up again.

One of the beauties of Jungle Law is that punishment settles all scores. There is no nagging afterward.

It is the hardest thing in the world to frighten a mongoose, because he is eaten up from nose to tail with curiosity. The motto of all the mongoose family is “Run and find out,” and Rikki-tikki was a true mongoose.

“Now, don’t be angry after you’ve been afraid. That’s the worst kind of cowardice,” said the troop-horse.

— Spoken by a character · Her Majesty’s Servants

“There is none like to me!” says the Cub in the pride of his earliest kill; But the jungle is large and the Cub he is small. Let him think and be still.

— the Cub · Kaa’s Hunting

The Law of the Jungle, which never orders anything without a reason, forbids every beast to eat Man except when he is killing to show his children how to kill, and then he must hunt outside the hunting grounds of his pack or tribe.

The air was full of all the night noises that, taken together, make one big silence--the click of one bamboo stem against the other, the rustle of something alive in the undergrowth, the scratch and squawk of a half-waked bird (birds are awake in the night much more often than we imagine), and the fall of water ever so far away.

The reason the beasts give among themselves is that Man is the weakest and most defenseless of all living things, and it is unsportsmanlike to touch him.

What is the Law of the Jungle? Strike first and then give tongue.

— Bagheera · Mowgli’s Brothers

His spots are the joy of the Leopard: his horns are the Buffalo’s pride. Be clean, for the strength of the hunter is known by the gloss of his hide.

“Brother to a Prince and fellow to a beggar if he be found worthy.”

— Spoken by a character

She guessed--a woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty--that he had meant to go from the first, and with Mrs. Hauksbee.

Who’s the man that says that we’re all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding?

— Spoken by a character · Chapter V