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; 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!
Rudyard Kipling, in full Joseph Rudyard Kipling, (born December 30, 1865, Bombay [now Mumbai], India—died January 18, 1936, London, England) English short-story writer, poet, and novelist, his tales and poems of British soldiers in India, and his tales for children. In 1907 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first Englishman to be so honored.
These are only a very, very few of his works: Departmental Ditties; Plain Tales from the HillsSoldiers Three, The Phantom Rickshaw (containing the story “The Man Who Would Be King”, and Wee Willie Winkie (containing “Baa Baa, Black Sheep”);“Mandalay,” “Gunga Din,” and “Danny Deever”; The Seven Seas;The Light That Failed; Captains Courageous;Kim; The Jungle Box(1894) and The Second Jungle Book; Puck of Pook’s Hill; Rewards and Fairies;“The Man Who Was”; From Sea to Sea;Something of Myself.
The Swastika Many of Rudyard Kipling's older books have a swastika printed on their covers, which has led to many claiming that he is racist. The truth is that the swastika is an Indian sign of good luck, often used by Hindu traders on their account books; when the Nazis started to gain recognition, he commanded the engraver to remove it from the printing block. (Note that the arms of the Nazi swastika bend to the right, not to the left as in Kipling's which is more typical of the swastika used by Buddhists.)