Monday Morning Quote – Rudyard Kipling on the Unforgiving Minute

Monday Morning Quote is back to motivate you with celebrated English poet and writer, Rudyard Kipling.

Fill the unforgiving minute with sixty seconds worth of distance run. - Rudyard Kipling

Kipling was born in present-day Mumbai, India in 1865 and lived until 1936. During this lifespan, he produced many prolific written works, most famously, The Jungle Book. In 1871, he and his sister Alice were sent to Southsea, England for schooling, where they lived with Captain and Mrs. Holloway. This transition was not easy for Kipling. When he finally left in 1877, his lasting impressions of this time were quite miserable to say the least—in his autobiography, Kipling refers to the Southsea home as “The House of Desolation”. Every story has a silver lining, though: it was during this time that Kipling began turning to literature, absorbing the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Defoe, and Wilkie Collins, among others.

Today’s quote is extracted from the poem “If,” which, in itself, has received much attention over the years. The Art of Manliness, a website which features a manvotional series, a posting of a poems, essays or letters with the intent of inspiring men to become better men, began with this exact poem from Kipling. Below is the poem in its entirety for your reading pleasure:

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 all on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath 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!

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