Top 400 Jack London Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 8 of 9

351. “I call you metaphysicians because you reason metaphysically,” Ernest went on. “Your method of reasoning is the opposite to that of science. There is no validity to your conclusions. You can prove everything and nothing, and no two of you can agree upon anything. Each of you goes into his own consciousness to explain himself and the universe. As well may you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to explain consciousness by consciousness.”

— Jack London

352. “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

353. “Furthermore, the revolutionary parties in all countries gave public utterance to the socialist principle of international peace that must be preserved at all hazards, even to the extent of revolt and revolution at home. The.”

— Jack London

354. “The Bishop was aghast, and my father chuckled. “Yes, pig-ethics,” Ernest went on remorselessly. “That is the meaning of the capitalist system. And that is what your church is standing for, what you are preaching for every time you get up in the pulpit. Pig-ethics! There is no other name for it.” Bishop.”

— Jack London

355. “It was love that had worked the revolution in him, changing him from an uncouth sailor to a student and an artist; therefore, to him, the finest and greatest of the three, greater than learning and artistry, was love.”

— Jack London

356. “Bankruptcy – a peculiar institution that enabled an individual, who had failed in competitive industry, to forego paying his debts. The effect was to ameliorate the too savage conditions of the fang-and-claw social struggle.”

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

358. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

361. “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

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

— Jack London

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

367. “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

368. “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

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

— Jack London

370. “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

371. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

374. “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

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

— Jack London

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Jack London

381. “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

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

— Jack London

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

— Jack London

384. “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

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

— Jack London

386. “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

387. “I confess I began to grow incensed at this happy crowd streaming by, and to extract a sort of satisfaction from the London statistics which demonstrate that one in every four adults is destined to die on public charity, either in the workhouse, the infirmary, or the asylum.”

— Jack London

388. “Youth which lives by hope is riven by unrest.”

— Jack London

389. “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

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

— Jack London

391. “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

392. “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.”

— Jack London

393. “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

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

— Jack London

395. “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

396. “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

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

— Jack London

398. “His muscles became hard as iron, and he grew callous to all ordinary pain. He achieved an internal as well as external economy. 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

399. “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

400. “But the man dreaming greatly and pressed by sordid necessity, he is the man who must confront the absolute contradiction. He is the man who cannot pour his artist-soul into his work and exchange that work for bread and meat. The world is strangely and coldly averse to his exchanging the joy of his heart for the solace of his stomach. And to him is it given to discover that what the world prizes most it demands least, and that what it clamors the loudest after it does not prize at all.”

— Jack London