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 minuteWith 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 · Rewards and Fairies
Courage & motivation
“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,”
- Author
- Rudyard Kipling
- Work
- Rewards and Fairies
- Year
- 1910
- Chapter / part
- If—
- Length
- 68 words
- Source
- Project Gutenberg eBook #556
Public domain. This passage is in the public domain. Rudyard Kipling died in 1936, more than 70 years ago, and the work was first published in 1910. You can copy, print, read aloud or sell it without asking permission; a credit is kind but not required. The text is copied word for word from the Project Gutenberg edition linked here.
Related passages
Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel;But do not dull thy palm with entertainmentOf each new-hatch’d, unfledg’d comrade.
Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice:Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgement.Costly thy habit as thy purse can buy,But not express’d in fancy; rich, not gaudy:For the apparel oft proclaims the man;And they in France of the best rank and stationAre of a most select and generous chief in that.Neither a borrower nor a lender be:For loan oft loses both itself and friend;And borrowing dulls the edge of husbandry.
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.”
In truth, whatever is worth doing at all, is worth doing well; and nothing can be done well without attention: I therefore carry the necessity of attention down to the lowest things, even to dancing and dress.
Wear your learning, like your watch, in a private pocket: and do not pull it out and strike it; merely to show that you have one. If you are asked what o'clock it is, tell it; but do not proclaim it hourly and unasked, like the watchman.
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