Rudyard Kipling Biography | Nobel Prize Winner | Motivational Quotations

Rudyard Kipling, an English author and poet, was born on 30.12.1865, in Bombay in the Bombay Residency of British India. His famous works are well known as children’s fictional stories like Kim, Jungle Book and Puck of Pook’s Hill.

Out of all his literary works, Jungle Book has earned him a pretty wide acclaim across the world. The fable of the novel was picturised in many forms like animated cartoon films and feature films with high tech graphics. However, long before the sophisticated graphical visualization came into being, magazines and periodicals for children had a heyday publishing different lengthy episodes of jungle book as prolonged vivid series of cartoonistic presentation. The fame of Jungle Book, written in 1894, has scaled inestimable heights among kids and elders alike. Even today it is considered as his magnum opus. Rudyard Kipling became a common household word in the families bustling with tumultuous frolicsome sprightly kids. The name Jungle Book has ascended to reach the stage of fame to echo immediately the name of the author at the mere mention of title of the book.

Early Life Of Rudyard Kipling:

Although Rudyard Kipling was born in India, he had his share of gruesome childhood in England when he was sent by his parents from India to Southsea, England where he was supposed to receive British formal education. His parents were John and Alice and he shared more intimacy with his mother.  As Alice sent her six year old son to England for studies, he was mentally crestfallen for having to live away from his beloved mother. He had to stay with his foster family in England where he helplessly bore the brunt of endless ill-treatment by his demonic foster mother during his entire five year-stay with them. It was also difficult for him to get himself acclimatized in the school. The only relief he found was in the books he liked to read. When he turned 11, he was at the verge of nervous breakdown being unable to bear the wicked treatment meted out by his aunt. As a great solace, a visitor watched him undergo severe trauma at the hands of the diabolic mistress and apprised immediately his mother about her son’s miserable heart-rending plight in England. On coming to know the macabre ordeal of the child, Alice rushed to him and lost no time to rescue him from the hellish house and allowed him to enjoy an unbridled bout of vacation for receiving much needed succour. Later, she got him admitted to a new school in Devonshire where Rudyard Kipling began to show his true potential in literature. He shone well in his flair and even became the editor of the school newspaper.

His Brilliant Period:

When Rudyard Kipling returned to India in 1882, he began to enjoy himself from the day he set his foot in India. He was with his parents in Lahore, which was then a part of undivided India. Aware of his inclination for literature, his father got him a job with a local newspaper. In subsequent years, he wrote a collection of forty short stories called “Plain tales from the hills” and “Soldiers Three” which were well received in England too. Driven by a small desire to flaunt his fame in the country where he spent his early childhood, he went back to England in 1889 where he met an American journalist Wolcott Barrestier who became his close friend later and took him to USA. The next set of his writings included Wee Willie Winkie and American Notes. After the death of Barrestier, Kipling married his sister Carrie. Rudyard Kipling bought a house in Brattlebro, Vermont, USA and named it ‘Naulahka’.   He continued to shine as a writer there too and he authored ‘Jungle Book’ (1894), ‘The Naulahka: A Story of West and East’ (1892) and the ‘Second Jungle Book’ (1895). All his works met with worldwide acclamation.

Subsequent Works:

At the turn of the century, he published another adventurous novel ‘Kim’ in 1901 which became very popular. His spree of writings continued in the names of Puck of Pook’s Hill (1905), Actions and Reactions (1909), Debts and Credits (1926), Thy Servant a Dog (1930) and Limits and Renewals (1932).

Fag End of Life:

Although he became active and busy in writing during the final years of his life, the magnitude of success was not as much as during his previous years. He developed duodenal ulcer during the last few days of his life and in spite of surgery, he fought for life for about six days and finally succumbed to the ailment on January 18, 1936.

Coveted Distinction:

Rudyard Kipling was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in 1907 as he was considered the most eligible luminary in literature by the Swedish Academy, among all the exceedingly deserving candidates. He was hailed as the most suitable successor to take up the mantle that was once gloriously occupied by Lord Tennyson. Rudyard Kipling won an immense popularity not mere in the Anglo-Indian world but much beyond the frontiers of expansive British Empire.

Although Rudyard Kipling was not known for possessing profound knowledge of any particular subject, his expressing style and narrative ability to describe the nuances of different characters and fecundity in presentation of scenic picturesqueness of nature in various contexts kept him aside from the literary firmament.

Motivational Quotes From Rudyard Kipling:

• “Never look backwards or you'll fall down the stairs.”

• “God could not be everywhere, and therefore he made mothers.”

• “We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.”

• “Gardens are not made by singing 'Oh, how beautiful,' and sitting in the shade.”

• “Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind.”

•  “If you can keep your wits about you while all others are losing theirs, and blaming you. The world will be yours and everything in it, what's more, you'll be a man, my son.”

• “A woman's guess is much more accurate than a man's certainty.”

• “I always prefer to believe the best of everybody, it saves so much trouble.”

• “All the people like us are we, and everyone else is They.”

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

• “He wrapped himself in quotations - as a beggar would enfold himself in the purple of Emperors.”

• “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke.”

• “The silliest woman can manage a clever man; but it needs a very clever woman to manage a fool.”

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

• Borrow trouble for yourself, if that's your nature, but don't lend it to your neighbours.”

• “When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains, and the women come out to cut up what remains, jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your gawd like a soldier.”

• “Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.”

• “An ounce of mother is worth a pound of clergy.”

• “Small miseries, like small debts, hit us in so many places, and meet us at so many turns and corners, that what they want in weight, they make up in number, and render it less hazardous to stand the fire of one cannon ball, than a volley composed of such a shower of bullets.”

• “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!'”

• “He travels the fastest who travels alone.”

• “And that is called paying the Dane-geld; but we've proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld you never get rid of the Dane.”

• “Everyone is more or less mad on one point.”

• “A man's mind is wont to tell him more than seven watchmen sitting in a tower.”

• “For the female of the species is more deadly than the male.”

• “Often and often afterwards, the beloved Aunt would ask me why I had never told anyone how I was being treated. Children tell little more than animals, for what comes to them they accept as eternally established.”

• “A people always ends by resembling its shadow.”

• “If I were hanged on the highest hill, Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine! I know whose love would follow me still Mother o' mine, O mother o' mine!”

• “Heaven grant us patience with a man in love.”

• If I were dammed of body and soul, I know whose prayers would make me whole, mother o' mine o mother o' mine.”