Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 2 of 9

51. “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

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

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

— Jack London

55. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

58. “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

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

— Jack London

60. “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

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

— Jack London

62. “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

63. “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

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

— Jack London

65. “Strength is an empty shell.”

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

68. “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

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

— Jack London

70. “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

71. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

75. “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

76. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

82. “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

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

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

— Jack London

87. “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

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

— Jack London

89. “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

90. “Who Has Won to Mastership.”

— Jack London

91. “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

92. “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

93. “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

94. “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

95. “Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.”

— Jack London

96. “Old longings nomadic leap, Chafing at custom’s chain; Again from its brumal sleep Wakens the ferine strain.”

— Jack London

97. “So that was the way. No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you.”

— Jack London

98. “The old-timer had been very serious in laying down the law that no man must travel alone in the Klondike after fifty below. Well, here he was; he had had the accident; he was alone; and he had saved himself. Those old-timers were rather womanish, some of them, he thought. All a man had to do was to keep his head, and he was all right. Any man who was a man could travel alone.”

— Jack London

99. “He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. 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

100. “And then there were our sweet stolen moments in the midst of our work – just a word, or caress, or flash of love-light; and our moments were sweeter for being stolen. For we lived on the heights, where the air was keen and sparkling, where the toil was for humanity, and where sordidness and selfishness never entered. We loved love, and our love was never smirched by anything less than the best. And this out of all remains: I did not fail.”

— Jack London