Top 100 Jack London Quotes
#1. If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!
Jack London
#2. As imagination grew it is likely that the fear of death increased until the Folk that were to come projected this fear into the dark and peopled it with spirits.
Jack London
#3. a starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.
Jack London
#4. The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.
Jack London
#5. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind.
Jack London
#6. He had the "Love-sonnets from the Portuguese" in mind as he wrote, and he wrote under the best conditions for great work, at a climacteric of living, in the throes of his own sweet love-madness. The
Jack London
#7. Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?
Jack London
#8. At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.
Jack London
#9. A Scotch half-breed took charge of him and his mates, and in company with a dozen other dog-teams he started back over the weary trail to Dawson. It was no light running now, nor record time, but heavy toil each day, with a heavy load behind; for this was the mail train,
Jack London
#10. In dim ways he recognised in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild.
Jack London
#11. Wolf - tis what he is. He's not blackhearted like some men. 'Tis no heart he has at all.
Jack London
#12. Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.
Jack London
#13. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman.
Jack London
#15. Here were we, drawn together by mutual rage and the impulse toward cooperation, led off into forgetfulness by the establishment of a rude rhythm.
Jack London
#16. But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.
Jack London
#17. The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck
Jack London
#18. The more he studied, the more vistas he caught of fields of knowledge yet unexplored, and the regret that days were only twenty-four hours long became a chronic complaint with him.
Jack London
#19. Every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.
Jack London
#20. I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.
Jack London
#21. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed.
Jack London
#22. In advance of the dogs, on wide snowshoes, toiled a man. At the rear of the sled toiled a second man. On the sled, in the box, lay a third man whose toil was over - a man whom the Wild had conquered and beaten down until he would never move nor struggle again.
Jack London
#23. He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.
Jack London
#24. It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh, and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.
Jack London
#25. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to them the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild.
Jack London
#26. The same amazing blush he had seen once
Jack London
#27. He had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial.
Jack London
#28. Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.
Jack London
#29. She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.
Jack London
#30. John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak. "If you strike that dog again, I'll kill you," he at last managed to say in a choking voice.
Jack London
#31. I was in touch with great souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of commercial expansion and world empire.
Jack London
#32. The champagne is already flat. The sparkle and bubble has gone out and it is a tasteless drink.
Jack London
#33. In a saturated population life is always cheap.
Jack London
#34. Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.
Jack London
#35. Hers was that common insularity of mind that makes human creatures believe that their color, creed, and politics are best and right and that other human creatures scattered over the world are less fortunately placed than they.
Jack London
#36. I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.
Jack London
#37. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their significances.
Jack London
#38. Times have changed since Christ's day. A rich man to-day who gives all he has to the poor is crazy. There is no discussion. Society has spoken.
Jack London
#39. There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.
Jack London
#40. We must accept the capitalistic stage in social evolution as about on a par with the earlier monkey stage. The human had to pass through those stages in its rise from the mire and slime of low organic life. It was inevitable that much of the mire and slime should cling and be not easily shaken off.
Jack London
#41. Such verdicts are crimes against truth. The Law is a lie, and through it men lie most shamelessly.
Jack London
#42. And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.
Jack London
#43. ... and from that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.
Jack London
#44. Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.
Jack London
#45. It was the worst hurt he had ever known.
Jack London
#46. They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.
Jack London
#47. In years and years not one of them has been in contact with a good woman, or within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature. There
Jack London
#48. Class supremacy can rest only on class degradation
Jack London
#49. Sagacious agent could, I suppose, be desired,
Jack London
#50. Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible
if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.
Jack London
#51. Well, I am going to exercise my prerogative of roaring and show you how fares nobility. Watch me.
Jack London
#52. He was a large, fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful representation of a quivering jelly mountain of fat.
Jack London
#53. Sitka Charley started. There had been more than one shot, yet there was but one other rifle in the party. He gave a fleeting glance at the men who lay so quietly, smiled viciously at the wisdom of the trail, and hurried on to meet the Men of the Yukon.
Jack London
#54. Now it happens that I am a fluid sort of an organism, with sufficient kinship with life to fit myself in 'most anywhere.
Jack London
#55. They seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton.
Jack London
#56. We were not many, and the world was very small. There were strange lands to the east- islands like Akutan; so we thought all the world was islands, and did not mind.
Jack London
#58. Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.
Jack London
#59. Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light.
Jack London
#60. I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.
Jack London
#61. Told me a thing about yourself. All that I know
Jack London
#62. Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.
Jack London
#63. An' right here I want to remark,' Bill went on, 'that that animal's familiarity with camp-fires is suspicious an' immoral.'
'It knows for certain more'n a self-respectin' wolf ought to know,' Henry agreed
Jack London
#64. Everything is good ... as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death's horses they run in span.
Jack London
#65. I love to think of the success of Berande," he said; "but that is secondary. It is subordinate to the dearest wish, which is that some day you will share Berande with me in a completer way than that of mere business partnership. It is for you, some day, when you are ready, to be my wife.
Jack London
#66. I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums. All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me. Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.
Jack London
#67. Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity," Ernest continued. "You are sincere. You preach what you believe. There lies your strength and your value - to the capitalist class.
Jack London
#68. One rifle, one blanket, twenty bottles of hooch. Rifle broke. She said this last scornfully, as though disgusted at how low her maiden-value had been rated.
Jack London
#69. He had a method of accepting things, without questioning the why and wherefore.
Jack London
#70. PLEASE DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT KNOCKING.
PLEASE DO NOT KNOCK.
Jack London
#71. Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.
Jack London
#72. You stand on dead men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly
Jack London
#73. He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies
Jack London
#74. Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.
Jack London
#75. Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.
Jack London
#76. you don't know the game of buying brains. I do. That's my specialty. I'm going to make money out of them,
Jack London
#79. He could eat anything, no matter how loathsome or indigestible; and, once eaten, the juices of his stomach extracted the last least particle of nutriment; and his blood carried it to the farthest reaches of his body, building it into the toughest and stoutest of tissues.
Jack London
#80. And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.
Jack London
#81. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.
Jack London
#82. In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death.
Jack London
#83. Tottered through the forest, sitting down often to rest, what of weakness and of shortness of breath. One day While Fang encountered a young wolf, gaunt and scrawny, loose-jointed with famine. Had he not been hungry himself, White Fang might have gone with him and
Jack London
#84. I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.
Jack London
#85. Our ape-like and arboreal ancestors entered upon the first of many short cuts. To crack a marrow-bone with a rock was the act which fathered the tool, and between the cracking of a marrow-bone and the riding down town in an automobile lies only a difference of degree.
Jack London
#86. Dogs asleep in the sun often whined and barked, but they were unable to tell what they saw that made them whine and bark. He had often wondered what it was. And that was all he was, a dog asleep in the sun.
Jack London
#87. From ourselves, she completed, with a most adorable smile, whimsical as I had never seen it, for it was whimsical with love.
Jack London
#88. The myriads that raise the cry of hunger wail in the greatest empire in the world
Jack London
#89. We wanted to select our own labour. In another year the time will be up for most of the original gang. You see, they were recruited during the first year of Berande, and their contracts expire on different months.
Jack London
#90. Is love so gross a thing that it must feed upon publication and public notice ? It would seem so.
Jack London
#91. It must always remain the great curiosity of history - a whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and undreamed; and it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social processes. Capitalism
Jack London
#92. But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded disobedience ... In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.
Jack London
#93. Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time.
Jack London
#94. Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.
Jack London
#95. I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.
(from Who's Who in Hell)
Jack London
#96. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time.
Jack London
#97. Then he dozed off to sleep and to dream dreams that for madness and audacity rivalled those of poppy-eaters
Jack London
#98. The clay of White Fang had been molded until he became what he was, morose and lonely, unloving and ferocious, the enemy of all his kind.
Jack London
#99. It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the doing of it.
Jack London
#100. The dark circle became a dot on the moon-flooded snow as Spitz disappeared from view.
Jack London
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