Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

165. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

168. “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

169. “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

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

— Jack London

171. “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

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Jack London

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

180. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “It is what we of the working class preach. We know, and well we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you.”

— Jack London

193. “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

194. “The toil of the traces seemed the supreme expression of their being, and all that they lived for and the only thing in which they took delight.”

— Jack London

195. “They had seen life, and done deeds, and lived romances, but they did not know it.”

— Jack London

196. “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

197. “The swift changes in our industrial system are causing equally swift changes in our religious, political, and social structures. An unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the fibre and structure of society. One can only dimly feel these things. But they are in the air, now, to-day. One can feel the loom of them – things vast, vague, and terrible.”

— Jack London

198. “She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.”

— Jack London

199. “A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, “ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.”

— Jack London

200. “And there were easements and satisfactions. To have a full stomach, to doze lazily in the sunshine–such things were remuneration in full for his ardours and toils, while his ardours and tolls were in themselves self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself. So the cub had no quarrel with his hostile environment. He was very much alive, very happy, and very proud of himself.”

— Jack London