Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “So the little thing grew bigger. He was healthy and normal, ate regularly, slept long hours, and yet the growing little thing was becoming an obsession. WORK PERFORMED. The phrase haunted his brain.”

— Jack London

252. “As some one has said, they do everything for the poor except get off their backs.”

— Jack London

253. “Why should I and the beauty in me be ruled by the dead? Beauty is alive and everlasting. Languages come and go. They are the dust of the dead.”

— Jack London

254. “It was a placing of his destiny in another’s hands, a shifting of the responsibilities of existence. This in itself was compensation, for it is always easier to lean upon another than to stand alone.”

— Jack London

255. “I’m afraid Mr. Everhard is right,” he said. “LAISSEZ-FAIRE, the let-alone policy of each for himself and devil take the hindmost. As Mr. Everhard said the other night, the function you churchmen perform is to maintain the established order of society, and society is established on that foundation.” “But that is not the teaching of Christ!” cried the Bishop. “The.”

— Jack London

256. “Between us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood. And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.”

— Jack London

257. “He was a violent, unjust man. Why the plague germs spared him I can never understand. It would seem, in spite of our old metaphysical notions about absolute justice, that there is no justice in the universe. Why did he live? – an iniquitous, moral monster, a blot on the face of nature, a cruel, relentless, bestial cheat as well. All.”

— Jack London

258. “It was a pain and an unrest; and it received easement only by the touch of the new god’s presence. At such times love was joy to him, a wild, keen–thrilling satisfaction. But when away from his god, the pain and the unrest returned; the void in him sprang up and pressed against him with its emptiness, and the hunger gnawed and gnawed unceasingly.”

— Jack London

259. “Rise from the mud, let the sunshine clense your eyes, and thrust your shoulders into the stars!”

— Jack London

260. “I am a sick man – oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.”

— Jack London

261. “The great majority of habitual drinkers are born not only without desire for alcohol, but with actual repugnance toward it. Not the first, nor the twentieth, nor the hundredth drink, succeeded in giving them the liking. But they learned, just as men learn to smoke; though it is far easier to learn to smoke than to learn to drink. They learned because alcohol was so accessible.”

— Jack London

262. “Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world.”

— Jack London

263. “It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang-out. Yes; and it might be in a prohibition state...”

— Jack London

264. “He lighted a cigarette, and in the curling smoke of it caught visions of his English mother, and wondered if she would understand how her son could love a woman who cried because she could not be skipper of a schooner in the cannibal isles.”

— Jack London

265. “And then, in splendor and glory, came the great idea. He would write. He would be one of the eyes through which the world saw, one of the ears through which it heard, one of the hearts through which it felt.”

— Jack London

266. “In short, Beauty Smith was a monstrosity, and the blame of it lay elsewhere. He was not responsible. The clay of him had been moulded in the making.”

— Jack London

267. “They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.”

— Jack London

268. “John Barleycorn was blunting me.”

— Jack London

269. “With the last remnant of his strength.”

— Jack London

270. “The desire to do it was strong, but stronger still was the imperative command of his nature not to do it. In spite of himself he was still faithful to Love. The old days of license and easy living were gone. He could not bring them back, nor could he go back to them, He was changed – how changed he had not realized until now.”

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

272. “Man no longer follows instinct with the old natural fidelity. He has developed into a reasoning creature, and can intellectually cling to life or discard life just as life happens to promise great pleasure or pain.”

— Jack London

273. “White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength... There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Gray Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Gray Beaver did not caress nor speak kind words. It was not his way.”

— Jack London

274. “Her own terror rushed upon me, and in that moment of fear, – the most terrible fear a man can experience, – I knew that in inexpressible ways she was dear to me.”

— Jack London

275. “The world slept, and it was like the sleep of death.”

— Jack London

276. “Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.”

— Jack London

277. “Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded disobedience. His mother and fear impelled him to keep away from the white wall. Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light. So there was no damming up the tide of life that was rising within him – rising with every mouthful of meat he swallowed, with every breath he drew. In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.”

— Jack London

278. “These limitations and restraints were laws. To be obedient to them was to escape hurt and make for happiness.”

— Jack London

279. “But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.”

— Jack London

280. “We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly remunerated members of the Bar in every centre of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the uses of great wealth.”

— Jack London

281. “Already the zest of combat, which of old had been so keen and lasting, had died down, and he discovered that he was self-analytical, too much so to live, single heart and single hand, so primitive an existence.”

— Jack London

282. “Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.”

— Jack London

283. “In the day you rise in your strength, toothless and clawless, you will be as harmless as an army of clams.”

— Jack London

284. “I’ll have you know I do the swearing on this ship. If I need your assitance I’ll call you.” Capt. Wolf Larsen.”

— Jack London

285. “Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.”

— Jack London

286. “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

287. “It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly;.”

— Jack London

288. “What did you have in you? – some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.”

— Jack London

289. “In a civilisation frankly materialistic and based upon property, not soul, it is inevitable that property shall be exalted over soul, that crimes against property shall be considered far more serious than crimes against the person.”

— Jack London

290. “We fight best, and die best, and live best, for what we love.”

— Jack London

291. “I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant faces peering at me through the semi-darkness. A sudden and deep sympathy welled up in me. I remembered the Cockney’s way of putting it. How God must have hated them that they should be tortured so!”

— Jack London

292. “We are all prone to think there is something wrong with the mental processes of the man who disagrees with us.”

— Jack London

293. “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

294. “The books were alive in these men. They talked with fire and enthusiasm, the intellectual stimulant stirring them as he had seen drink and anger stir other men. What he heard was no longer the philosophy of the dry, printed word, written by half-mythical demigods like Kant and Spencer. It was living philosophy, with warm, red blood, incarnated in these two men till its very features worked with excitement. Now.”

— Jack London

295. “Dark spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.”

— Jack London

296. “The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the ‘kick’.”

— Jack London

297. “Such words he spoke, but they are not his words. He was a vulgar, low-minded man, and vile oaths fell continually from his lips.”

— Jack London

298. “Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman. He was becoming anti-social. Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people. Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him. They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.”

— Jack London

299. “Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course over-estimated since it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.”

— Jack London

300. “He had discovered, in the course of his reading, two schools of fiction. One treated of man as a god, ignoring his earthly origin; the other treated of man as a clod, ignoring his heavensent dreams and divine possibilities.”

— Jack London