Rudyard Kipling, 1865 - 1936

Short-story writer, poet, and novelist (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling, born in Bombay, India (1865). His father was a British artist who got an appointment to run an art school in Bombay, but after a series of typhoid and cholera outbreaks, Kipling's parents decided to send him back to England for his own safety.

After school, he went off to the northwest corner of India, where the British were fighting a war with Afghanistan. Kipling got a job on an army newspaper, and he also began writing fiction and poetry. After six years of publishing his work, he sold everything he'd written for 250 pounds to a company that began selling paperback editions of his collected works in railway stations around India. Those paperback editions became more successful than anyone had ever expected, and suddenly magazines and newspapers were begging Kipling to write for them. He moved back to London, where he'd become a literary celebrity, but he found the life of a celebrity did not agree with him.

So he traveled the world for a few years, and finally settled in Vermont. And it was there, in a rented cottage surrounded by snow, that he began to reimagine the India of his childhood, and he wrote the book for which he's best known today, The Jungle Book (1894), about a boy raised by wolves who grows up with the other jungle animals until a tiger forces him to go back and live with people.




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 imposters 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;
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!


*The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.

*All the people like us are we, And everyone else is They.

*The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a clever woman to manage a fool”

*If you don't get what you want, it's a sign either that you did not seriously want it, or that you tried to bargain over the price.

*If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.

*We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.

*Of all the liars in the world, sometimes the worst are your own fears.

*I keep six honest serving men: They taught me all I knew: Their names are What and Why and When and How and Where and Who.

*Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs.

*Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run.