Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.”

— Jack London

52. “He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.”

— Jack London

53. “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

54. “A man with a club is a law-maker.”

— Jack London

55. “This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone.”

— Jack London

56. “He was always striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.”

— Jack London

57. “He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.”

— Jack London

58. “One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.”

— Jack London

59. “But I am I, and I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don’t like a thing, I don’t like it, that’s all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can’t follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.”

— Jack London

60. “There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.”

— Jack London

61. “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

62. “The greatest of the arts is the conquering of men.”

— Jack London

63. “For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.”

— Jack London

64. “Go strip off your clothes that are a nuisance in this mellow clime. Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you, hit the sea’s breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should.”

— Jack London

65. “In a saturated population life is always cheap.”

— Jack London

66. “Strength is an empty shell.”

— Jack London

67. “There is a patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself.”

— Jack London

68. “Ever bike? Now that’s something that makes life worth living!”

— Jack London

69. “Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.”

— Jack London

70. “He must master or be mastered; while to show mecy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.”

— Jack London

71. “I was jealous; therefore I loved.”

— Jack London

72. “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

73. “His bondage had softened him. Irresponsibility had weakened him. He had forgotten how to shift for himself. The night yawned about him.”

— Jack London

74. “Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.”

— Jack London

75. “Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.”

— Jack London

76. “I remembered my days and nights of sunshine and starshine, where life was all a wild sweet wonder, a spiritual paradise of unselfish adventure and ethical romance. And I saw before me, ever blazing and burning, the Holy Grail.”

— Jack London

77. “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

78. “Man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland.”

— Jack London

79. “Beauty is the only master to serve.”

— Jack London

80. “Sacredam!” he cried, when his eyes lit upon Buck. “Dat one dam bully dog! Eh? How moch?”

— Jack London

81. “Pursuit and possession are accompanied by states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.”

— Jack London

82. “Nietzsche was right. I won’t take the time to tell you who Nietzsche was, but he was right. The world belongs to the strong – to the strong who are noble as well and who do not wallow in the swine-trough of trade and exchange. The world belongs to the true nobleman, to the great blond beasts, to the noncompromisers, to the ’yes-sayers.”

— Jack London

83. “Some sorts of truth are truer than others.”

— Jack London

84. “Every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.”

— Jack London

85. “Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.”

— Jack London

86. “He had learned well the law of club and fang, and he never forewent an advantage or drew back from a foe he had started on the way to Death.”

— Jack London

87. “It was not a column, but a mob, an awful river that filled the street, the people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy had vanished. It was now dynamic – a fascinating spectacle of dread.”

— Jack London

88. “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

89. “Ma tutte le cose cattive, come quelle buone, hanno una fine...”

— Jack London

90. “In face of the facts that modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, and that his producing power is a thousand times greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclusion is possible than that the capitalist class has mismanaged, that you have mismanaged, my masters, that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged.”

— Jack London

91. “You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong – to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.”

— Jack London

92. “Labor takes its share in wages; capital takes its share in profits.”

— Jack London

93. “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

94. “Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang – or rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang. It was a matter of principle and conscience. He felt that the ill done White Fang was a debt incurred by man and that it must be paid.”

— Jack London

95. “But, – and there it is, – we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality.”

— Jack London

96. “Who Has Won to Mastership.”

— Jack London

97. “Power will be the arbiter, as it always has been the arbiter. It is a struggle of classes. Just as your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so shall it be dragged down by my class, the working class.”

— Jack London

98. “He tried to sniff with her, but she retreated playfully and coyly. Every advance on his part was accompanied by a corresponding retreat on her part. Step by step she was luring him away from the security of his human companionship.”

— Jack London

99. “Hunting and kindred outdoor delights had kept down the fat and hardened his muscles; and to him, as to the cold-tubbing races, the love of water had been a tonic and a health preserver.”

— Jack London

100. “To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his altars crumbling; but to the wolf and the wild dog that have come in to crouch at man’s feet, this grief has never come.”

— Jack London