Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.”

— Jack London

352. “It was illumination, a great light in the darkness of his ignorance, and he read poetry more avidly than ever.”

— Jack London

353. “Dat one dam bully dog! Eh? How moch?”

— Jack London

354. “All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.”

— Jack London

355. “Era piombato nelle tenebre. E nel momento stesso in cui lo seppe, smise di sapere.”

— Jack London

356. “He alone rated himself beyond diamonds and rubies. Diamonds and rubies are gone, spread out on the deck to be washed away by a bucket of sea-water, and he does not even know that the diamonds and rubies are gone. He does not lose anything, for with the loss of himself he loses the knowledge of loss. Don’t you see? And what have you to say?”

— Jack London

357. “Buck did not cry out. He did not check himself, but drove in upon Spitz, shoulder to shoulder, so hard that he missed the throat. They rolled over and over in the powdery snow. Spitz gained his feet almost as though he had not been overthrown, slashing Buck down the shoulder and leaping clear. Twice his teeth clipped together, like the steel jaws of a trap, as he backed away for better footing, with lean and lifting lips that writhed and snarled.”

— Jack London

358. “And so with that girl. You noticed that her eyes were what I might call hard. She has never been sheltered. She has had to take care of herself, and a young girl can’t take care of herself and keep her eyes soft and gentle like – like yours, for example.”

— Jack London

359. “This is the unstable, mob-minded mass, which sits on the fence, ever ready to fall this side or that and indecorously clamber back again; which puts a Democratic administration into office one election, and a Republican the next; which discovers and.”

— Jack London

360. “The onlookers laughed uproariously, and he felt ashamed, he knew not why, for it was his first snow.”

— Jack London

361. “The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real.”

— Jack London

362. “It was only for a moment, but it was a long moment to him, during which his blood turned to wine and sang through his veins.”

— Jack London

363. “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.”

— Jack London

364. “All life likes power, and Beauty Smith was no exception. Denied the expression of power amongst his own kind, he fell back upon the lesser creatures and there vindicated the life that was in him. But Beauty Smith had not created himself, and no blame was to be attached to him. He had come into the world with a twisted body and a brute intelligence. This had constituted the clay of him, and it had not been kindly moulded by the world.”

— Jack London

365. “Those were their cards and they had to play them, willy-nilly, hunchbacked or straight backed, crippled or clean-limbed, addle-pated or clear-headed. There was no fairness in it. The cards most picked up put them into the sucker class; the cards of a few enabled them to become robbers. The playing of the cards was life – the crowd of players, society. The table.”

— Jack London

366. “When I work as a beast, I drink as a beast. When I live like a man, I drink like a man.”

— Jack London

367. “Thornton’s doubt was strong in his face, but his fighting spirit was aroused – the fighting spirit that soars above odds, fails to recognize the impossible, and is deaf to all save the clamor for battle.”

— Jack London

368. “Several weeks went by, during which Martin Eden studied his grammar, reviewed the books on etiquette, and read voraciously the books that caught his fancy.”

— Jack London

369. “Dawn caught us on the northern brow, and in the gray light we dropped down through chaparral into redwood canyons deep and warm with the breath of passing summer.”

— Jack London

370. “The woman factor explains many things of men.”

— Jack London

371. “Mrs. Morse did not require a mother’s intuition to read the advertisement in Ruth’s face when she returned home. The flush that would not leave the cheeks told the simple story, and more eloquently did the eyes, large and bright, reflecting an unmistakable inward glory.”

— Jack London

372. “One broken hind leg,” he went on. “Three broken ribs, one at least of which has pierced the lungs. He has lost nearly all the blood in his body. There is a large likelihood of internal injuries. He must have been jumped upon. To say nothing of three bullet holes clear through him. One chance in a thousand is really optimistic. He hasn’t a chance in ten thousand.”

— Jack London

373. “The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.”

— Jack London

374. “And after all, what did it matter? Everybody died anyway, the good and the bad, the efficients and the weaklings, those that loved to live and those that scorned to live. They passed. Everything passed.”

— Jack London

375. “Not only did they not know how to work dogs, but they did not know how to work themselves.”

— Jack London

376. “To him who hears for the first time this weird song, is told the first and greatest secret of the Northland; to him who has heard it often, it is the solemn knell of lost endeavor. It is the plaint of tortured souls, for in it is invested the heritage of the North, the suffering of countless generations – the warning and the requiem to the world’s estrays.”

— Jack London

377. “He had hitched his wagon to a star and been landed in a pestiferous marsh.”

— Jack London

378. “You forget how I talked when you first met me. I have learned a new language since then. Before that time I talked as that girl talks. Now I can manage to make myself understood sufficiently in your language to explain that you do not know that other girl’s language.”

— Jack London

379. “A shout from Francois hailed his appearance. “Wot I say?” the dog-driver cried to Perrault. “Dat Buck for sure learn queek as anyt’ing.”

— Jack London

380. “But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.”

— Jack London

381. “No matter how breathless the air when he dug his nest by tree or bank, the wind the later blew inevitably found him to leeward, sheltered and snug.”

— Jack London

382. “He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.”

— Jack London

383. “At such moments her own emotions elevated him till he was as a god, and, as he gazed at her and listened, he seemed gazing on the face of life and reading its deepest secrets. And then, becoming aware of the heights of exquisite sensibility he attained, he decided that this was love and that love was the greatest thing in the world.”

— Jack London

384. “Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest. But as often as he gained the soft unbroken earth and the green shade, the love for John Thornton drew him back to the fire again.”

— Jack London

385. “It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.”

— Jack London

386. “Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation.”

— Jack London

387. “Nor did ever a miser prize his treasure as did I prize the knife.”

— Jack London

388. “He saw no beauty in the sunshine sifting down through the green leaves, nor did the azure vault of the sky whisper as of old and hint of cosmic vastness and secrets trembling to disclosure. Life was intolerably dull and stupid, and its taste was bad in his mouth.”

— Jack London

389. “Lonely he had lived, so far as his kind was concerned, and lonely he would continue to live.”

— Jack London

390. “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.”

— Jack London

391. “Parables don’t lie, but liars will parable.” – Lip-King.”

— Jack London

392. “Saints in heaven – how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime – ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while.”

— Jack London

393. “He saw, once for all, that he stood no chance against a man with a club. He had learned the lesson, and in all his after life he never forgot it.”

— Jack London

394. “Maria was amazed to learn that he had been in the Azores, where she had lived until she was eleven. She was doubly amazed that he had been in the Hawaiian Islands, whither she had migrated from the Azores with her people.”

— Jack London

395. “He had never seen dogs fight as these wolfish creatures fought, and his first experience taught him an unforgetable lesson.”

— Jack London

396. “And there came a day when the hawk’s shadow did not drive him crouching into the bushes. He had grown stronger and wiser, and more confident. Also, he was desperate. So he sat on his haunches, conspicuously in an open space, and challenged the hawk down out of the sky. For he knew that there, floating in the blue above him, was meat, the meat his stomach yearned after so insistently.”

— Jack London

397. “The wonderful patience of the trail... comes to men who toil hard and suffer sore, and remain sweet of speech and kindly.”

— Jack London

398. “Life was to him like strong, white light that hurts the tired eyes of a sick person.”

— Jack London

399. “Never had he been so fond of this body of his as now when his tenure of it was so precarious.”

— Jack London

400. “He hated the oblivion of sleep. There was too much to do, too much of life to live. He grudged every moment of life sleep robbed him of, and before the clock had ceased its clattering he was head and ears in the washbasin and thrilling to the cold bite of the water.”

— Jack London