Rudyard Kipling

I am the cat who walks by himself, and all places are alike to me.

I keep six honest serving-men:

(They taught me all I knew)

Their names are What and Where and When

And How and Why and Who.

Cities and Thrones and Powers,

Stand in Time's eye,

Almost as long as flowers,

Which daily die:

But, as new buds put forth

To glad new men,

Out of the spent and unconsidered Earth,

The Cities rise again.

Now these are the Laws of the jungle, and many and mighty are they;

But the head and the hoof of the Law and the haunch and the hump is—Obey!

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.

‘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.

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.

For to admire an' for to see,

For to be'old this world so wide—

It never done no good to me,

But I can't drop it if I tried!

And oft-times cometh our wise Lord God, master of every trade,

And tells them tales of His daily toil, of Edens newly made;

And they rise to their feet as He passes by, gentlemen unafraid.

Never praise a sister to a sister, in the hope of your compliments reaching the proper ears, and so preparing the way for you later on. Sisters are women first, and sisters afterwards; and you will find that you do yourself harm.

For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' “Chuck him out, the brute!”

But it's “Saviour of 'is country” when the guns begin to shoot.

Everyone is more or less mad on one point.