Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 9

151. “It certainly was cold, was his thought. That man from Sulphur Creek had spoken the truth when telling how cold it sometimes got in the country. And he had laughed at him at the time! That showed one must not be too sure of things. There was no mistake about it, it was cold.”

— Jack London

152. “He couldn’t fake being their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides, masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for sham or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He.”

— Jack London

153. “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. He had lessoned from Spitz, and from the chief fighting dogs of the police and mail, and knew there was no middle course. He must master or be mastered; while to show mercy 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

154. “For Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel. Cringing and snivelling himself before the blows or angry speech of a man, he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he.”

— Jack London

155. “Again and again, as he looked at each brutal performance, the lesson was driven home to Buck: a man with a club was a lawgiver, a master to be obeyed, though not necessarily conciliated.”

— Jack London

156. “And as I fall to fuddled sleep I hear youth crying, as Harry Kemp heard it: “I heard Youth calling in the night: ‘Gone is my former world-delight; For there is naught my feet may stay; The morn suffuses into day, It dare not stand a moment still But must the world with light fulfil. More evanescent than the rose My sudden rainbow comes and goes, Plunging bright ends across the sky – Yea, I am Youth because I die!”

— Jack London

157. “He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy.”

— Jack London

158. “Then one can’t make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.”

— Jack London

159. “There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the strength of the proletariat, is in our muscles, in our hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers.”

— Jack London

160. “Got to take a gamble. The only way to find out is to find out.”

— Jack London

161. “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

162. “If a company is distributing images and video then obviously they need bandwidth solutions. But if they are looking to the mass market then they must develop WAP sites.”

— Jack London

163. “Human kindness was like a sun shining upon him, and he flourished like a plant in good soil.”

— Jack London

164. “In short, the things he did were done because it was easier to do them than not to do them.”

— Jack London

165. “I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me.”

— Jack London

166. “Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden.”

— Jack London

167. “That night, he pointed his nose to the cold stars and gave the long wolf-howl.”

— Jack London

168. “Luchamos mejor, morimos mejor y vivimos mejor por aquello que amamos.”

— Jack London

169. “In dim ways he recognized in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man.”

— Jack London

170. “The first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.”

— Jack London

171. “It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a coward beg for life.”

— Jack London

172. “Drink,” says the White Logic. “The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence.”

— Jack London

173. “Here the train was halted. The Scotch half-breed slowly retraced his steps to the camp they had left. The men ceased talking. A revolver-shot rang out. The man came back hurriedly. The whips snapped, the bells tinkled merrily, the sleds churned along the trail; but Buck knew, and every dog knew, what had taken place behind the belt of river trees.”

— Jack London

174. “Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped.”

— Jack London

175. “They seemed to share the kindliness and largeness of John Thornton.”

— Jack London

176. “Bitter rage was his, but never blind rage. In passion to rend and destroy, he never forgot that his enemy was in like passion to rend and destroy.”

— Jack London

177. “It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.”

— Jack London

178. “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

179. “E quando, nelle silenziose notti gelate, puntava il muso a una stella e ululava a lungo come un lupo, erano i suoi antenati, ormai ridotti in polvere, a puntare il muso a una stella e ad ululare lungo i secoli attraverso di lui.”

— Jack London

180. “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

181. “In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death.”

— Jack London

182. “No man can be intellectually insulted. Insult, in its very nature, is emotional.”

— Jack London

183. “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

184. “Why this longing for Life? It is a game which no man wins. To live is to toil hard, and to suffer sore, till Old Age creeps heavily upon us and we throw down our hands on the cold ashes of dead fires. It is hard to live.”

— Jack London

185. “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.”

— Jack London

186. “T’ree vair’ good dogs,” Francois told Perrault. “Dat Buck, heem pool lak hell. I tich heem queek as anyt’ing.”

— Jack London

187. “When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.”

— Jack London

188. “No; I did not hate him. The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings. I can say only that I knew the gnawing of a desire for vengeance on him that was a pain in itself and that exceeded all the bounds of language.”

— Jack London

189. “But nobody else ever romped with White Fang. He did not permit it. He stood on his dignity, and when they attempted it, his warning snarl and bristling mane were anything but playful. That he allowed the master these liberties was no reason that he should be a common dog, loving here and loving there, everybody’s property for a romp and good time. He loved with single heart and refused to cheapen himself or his love.”

— Jack London

190. “They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit.”

— Jack London

191. “Cuando un hombre y una mujer desean unir sus corazones, pueden rodar cabezas e incluso caer reinos, pero ellos no renunciaran.”

— Jack London

192. “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

193. “Life’s a game and men the gamblers. They’ll stake their whole pile on the one chance in a thousand. Take away that one chance, and – they won’t play.”

— Jack London

194. “Her own limits were the limits of her horizon; but limited minds can recognize limitations only in others. And so she felt that her outlook was very wide indeed, and that where his conflicted with hers marked his limitations; and she dreamed of helping him to see as she saw, of widening his horizon until it was identified with hers.”

— Jack London

195. “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

196. “The sap was rising in the pines. The willows and aspens were bursting out in young buds. Shrubs and vines were putting on fresh garbs of green. Crickets sang in the nights, and in the days all manner of creeping, crawling things rustled forth into the sun. Partridges and woodpeckers were booming and knocking in the forest. Squirrels were chattering, birds singing, and overhead honked the wild-fowl driving up from the south in cunning wedges that split the air. From.”

— Jack London

197. “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

198. “Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped.”

— Jack London

199. “All my reading and studying of them has taught me that law is one thing and right is another thing. Ask any lawyer. You go to Sunday-school to learn what.”

— Jack London

200. “The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.”

— Jack London