Often misattributed to Friedrich Nietzsche.
Source: As quoted from “Interview with an Immoral,” Arthur Gordon, Reader’s Digest (July 1959). Reprinted in the Kipling Society journal, “Six Hours with Rudyard Kipling”, Vol. XXXIV. No. 162 (June, 1967) pp. 5-8. Interview took place in June, 1935 https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/pdf/KJ162.pdf
Contexte: Looking back, I think he knew that in my innocence I was eager to love everything and please everybody, and he was trying to warn me not to lose my own identity in the process. Time after time he came back to this theme. " The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you'll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself."
Rudyard Kipling: Citations en anglais
Prelude, Stanza 1.
Departmental Ditties and other Verses (1886)
“He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”
The Finest Story in the World http://www.telelib.com/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/prose/ManyInventions/fineststory.html (1893).
Other works
Source: Many Inventions
Contexte: When next he came to me he was drunk—royally drunk on many poets for the first time revealed to him. His pupils were dilated, his words tumbled over each other, and he wrapped himself in quotations—as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of emperors.
“There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,
Or the way of a man with a maid”
The Long Trail http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/words/authors/K/KiplingRudyard/verse/volumeXI/longtrail.html, Stanza 5.
Other works
Contexte: There be triple ways to take, of the eagle or the snake,
Or the way of a man with a maid;
But the fairest way to me is a ship's upon the sea
In the heel of the North-East Trade.
“A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.”
Source: Plain Tales from the Hills
“No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.”
For All We Have and Are, Stanza 4.
Other works
Contexte: No easy hope or lies
Shall bring us to our goal,
But iron sacrifice
Of body, will, and soul.
There is but one task for all—
One life for each to give.
What stands if Freedom fall?
Who dies if England live?
The Secret of the Machines, Stanza 7.
Other works
Contexte: 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!
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—
Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!—
Our touch can alter all created things,
We are everything on earth—except The Gods!
“I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.”
A Dead Statesman
Epitaphs of the War (1914-1918) (1918)
Contexte: I could not dig: I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?
“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch”
Stanza 4.
The Second Jungle Book (1895), If— (1896)
Contexte: 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!
Letter to L. C. Dunsterville, September 1916. Quoted in Lord Birkenhead, Rudyard Kipling. London : Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1978 (p.271).
The Gods of the Copybook Headings, Stanza 1 (1919).
Other works
Contexte: As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market-Place.
Peering through reverent fingers I watch them flourish and fall,
And the Gods of the Copybook Headings, I notice, outlast them all.
The Secret of the Machines, Stanza 7.
Other works
Contexte: 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!
We are greater than the Peoples or the Kings—
Be humble, as you crawl beneath our rods!—
Our touch can alter all created things,
We are everything on earth—except The Gods!
In the Neolithic Age, Stanza 5 (1895).
The Seven Seas (1896)
The Law of the Jungle, Stanzas 1 and 2.
The Second Jungle Book (1895)
Contexte: p>Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the Law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.</p
"Fiction", speech to the Royal Society of Literature, June 1926; published in Writings on Writing: Rudyard Kipling (1996), ed. Sandra Kemp and Lisa Lewis, p. 80 http://books.google.com/books?id=-AQStA5QMjwC&q=%22elder+sister%22&pg=PA80
Other works
The Ballad of East and West (1889).
Other works
Contexte: Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment 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!
Stanza 4.
The Second Jungle Book (1895), If— (1896)
Contexte: 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!
“If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.”
Source: The Collected Works
“We're all islands shouting lies to each other across seas of misunderstanding.”
Source: The Light That Failed
“For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.”
The Law of the Jungle, Stanzas 1 and 2.
The Second Jungle Book (1895)
Source: The Jungle Book
Contexte: p>Now this is the Law of the Jungle—as old and as true as the sky;
And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die.As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the Law runneth forward and back;
For the strength of the Pack is the Wolf, and the strength of the Wolf is the Pack.</p
“I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.”
The Cat that Walked by Himself.
Just So Stories (1902)
Source: The Cat That Walked By Himself
