Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

103. “Age is never so old as youth would measure it.”

— Jack London

104. “Man always gets less than he demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get cannot save them.”

— Jack London

105. “San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.”

— Jack London

106. “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

107. “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

108. “The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.”

— Jack London

109. “Somehow, the love of the islands, like the love of a woman, just happens. One cannot determine in advance to love a particular woman, nor can one so determine to love Hawaii.”

— Jack London

110. “There is a patience of the wild – dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself – that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food;.”

— Jack London

111. “A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.”

— Jack London

112. “It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.”

— Jack London

113. “The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.”

— Jack London

114. “Men do not knowingly drink for the effect alcohol produces on the body. What they drink for is the brain-effect; and if it must come through the body, so much the worse for the body.”

— Jack London

115. “But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.”

— Jack London

116. “If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.”

— Jack London

117. “No, sir. Go to hell sir. It’s the best I can do for you sir.”

— Jack London

118. “It’s colder than the hinges of hell a thousand years before the first fire was lighted.”

— Jack London

119. “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

120. “Cruelty, as a fine art, has attained its perfect flower in the trained-animal world.”

— Jack London

121. “Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.”

— Jack London

122. “Weedon Scott had set himself the task of redeeming White Fang – or rather, of redeeming mankind from the wrong it had done White Fang.”

— Jack London

123. “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

124. “It was heartbreaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable.”

— Jack London

125. “He was not immoral, but merely unmoral.”

— Jack London

126. “And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.”

— Jack London

127. “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

128. “All was confusion and action, and every moment life and limb were in peril. There was imperative need to be constantly alert; for these dogs and men were not town dogs and men. They were savages, all of them, who knew no law but the law of club and fang.”

— Jack London

129. “Too much is written by the men who can’t write about the men who do write.”

— Jack London

130. “Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.”

— Jack London

131. “Why didn’t you dare it before?” he asked harshly. “When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden?”

— Jack London

132. “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

133. “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

134. “The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.”

— Jack London

135. “With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself – one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.”

— Jack London

136. “His muscles had wasted away to knotty strings, and the flesh pads had disappeared, so that each rib and every bone in his frame were outlined cleanly through the loose hide that was wrinkled in folds of emptiness. It was heartbreaking, only Buck’s heart was unbreakable. The man in the red sweater had proved that.”

— Jack London

137. “Where others have hearts, he carries a tumor of rotten principles.”

— Jack London

138. “God is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke.”

— Jack London

139. “He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.”

— Jack London

140. “Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave.”

— Jack London

141. “The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.”

— Jack London

142. “I was five years old the first time I got drunk.”

— Jack London

143. “Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.”

— Jack London

144. “John Barleycorn makes his appeal to weakness and failure, to weariness and exhaustion. He is the easy way out. And he is lying all the time. He offers false strength to the body, false elevation to the spirit, making things seem what they are not and vastly fairer than what they are.”

— Jack London

145. “It was an old song, old as the breed itself – one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.”

— Jack London

146. “But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat into the lower valleys, he may be seen running at the head of the pack through the pale moonlight or glimmering borealis, leaping gigantic above his fellows, his great throat a-bellow as he sings a song of the younger world, which is the song of the pack.”

— Jack London

147. “Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.”

— Jack London

148. “What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there’s no more to be said.”

— Jack London

149. “He knew he was at last answering the call, running by the side of his wood brother toward the place from where the call surely came. Old memories were coming upon him fast, and he was stirring to them as of old he stirred to the realities of which they were the shadows. He had done this thing before, somewhere in that other and dimly remembered world, and he was doing it again now, running free in the open, the unpacked earth underfoot, the wide sky overhead.”

— Jack London

150. “It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the scheme of things.”

— Jack London