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

401. “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

402. “All the stiffness and gloss had gone out of his beautiful furry coat. The hair hung down, limp and draggled, or matted with dried blood where Hal’s club had bruised him. 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.”

— Jack London

403. “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

404. “One bully long res’.”

— Jack London

405. “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

406. “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

407. “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

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

— Jack London

409. “Often the man felt that he had bucked against the very essence of life – the unconquerable essence that swept the hawk down out of the sky like a feathered thunderbolt, that drove the great gray goose across the zones, that hurled the spawning salmon through two thousand miles of boiling Yukon flood.”

— Jack London

410. “And he dreamed as only age can dream upon the colossal futility of youth.”

— Jack London

411. “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

412. “He was remarkably susceptible to music. It was like strong drink, firing him to audacities of feeling, – a drug that laid hold of his imagination and went cloud-soaring through the sky. It banished sordid fact, flooded his mind with beauty, loosed romance and to its heels added wings.”

— Jack London

413. “He must master or be mastered;.”

— Jack London

414. “They ran through the night. And the next day found them still running. They were running over the surface of a world frozen and dead. No life stirred.”

— Jack London

415. “Oh, these cursed phrases, these lies of language, under which people with meat in their bellies and whole shirts on their backs shelter themselves, and evade the responsibility of their brothers and sisters, empty of belly and without whole shirts on their backs.”

— Jack London

416. “These peasants, who, throughout the world, hold potentates on their thrones, make statesmen illustrious, provide generals with lasting victories, all with ignorance, indifference, or half-witted hatred, moving the world with the strength of their arms, and getting their heads knocked together in the name of God, the king, or the stock exchange-immortal, dreaming, hopeless asses, who surrender their reason to the care of a shining puppet, and persuade some toy to carry their lives in his purse.”

— Jack London

417. “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

418. “And so we come to it – the everlasting mystery of woman. One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her.”

— Jack London

419. “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

420. “I had looked upon it as a simple task, what of the oars, mast, boom, and sprit, to say nothing of plenty of lines. But as I was without experience, and as every detail was an experiment and every successful detail an invention, the day was well gone before her shelter was an accomplished fact.”

— Jack London

421. “That first repulsion had been really a fear of her undiscovered self, and the fear had gone to sleep.”

— Jack London

422. “Five dollars for five thousand words, ten words for a cent, the market price for art. The disappointment of it, the lie of it, the infamy of it, were uppermost in his thoughts;.”

— Jack London

423. “Knee-deep in the wild oats of the hillside grazed two horses, chestnut-sorrels the pair of them, perfectly matched, warm and golden in the sunshine, their spring-coats a sheen of high-lights shot through with color-flashes that glowed like fiery jewels.”

— Jack London

424. “That is new-womanish talk,” he frowned. “Equal rights, the ballot, and all that.”

— Jack London

425. “Or maybe that was a dream, too, and the awakening would be the changing of the watches, when he would drop down out of his bunk in the lurching forecastle and go up on deck, under the tropic stars, and take the wheel and feel the cool tradewind blowing through his flesh.”

— Jack London

426. “Steward, Daughtry. Mr. Daughtry, friend, sir, or whatever I may name you, this is no fairy-story of the open boat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom under the sand. This is real. I have a heart. That, sir” – here he waved his extended hand under Daughtry’s nose – “is my hand. There is only one thing you may do, must do, right now. You must take that hand in your hand, and shake it, with your heart in your hand as mine is in my hand.”

— Jack London

427. “So he was harnessed in again, and proudly he pulled as of old, though more than once he cried involuntary from the bite of his inward hurt.”

— Jack London

428. “And to add confusion to confusion, there was the servant, an unceasing menace, that appeared noiselessly at his shoulder, a dire Sphinx that propounded puzzles and conundrums demanding instantaneous solution.”

— Jack London

429. “That is why they are for’ard, in that pigsty of a forecastle, because they lack the iron.”

— Jack London

430. “The Church does not protest against it,” Ernest replied. “And in so far as the Church does not protest, it condones, for remember the Church is supported by the capitalist class.”

— Jack London

431. “An’ when you’re dead, you’ll rot the same as me, an’ what’s it matter how you live? – eh? Tell me that what’s it matter in the long run?”

— Jack London

432. “But I ain’t got to the point yet. Here it is. I want to make my way to the kind of life you have in this house. There’s more in life than booze, an’ hard work, an’ knockin’ about. Now, how am I goin’ to get it? Where do I take hold an’ begin? I’m willin’ to work my passage.”

— Jack London

433. “He whirled with fierce passion on me: ‘Don’t you ever let yourself grow old, lad. Die when you’re young, or you’ll come to this. I’m tellin’ you sure. Seven an’ eighty years am I, an’ served my country like a man. Three good conduct stripes and the Victoria Cross, an’ this is what I get for it. I wish I was dead, I wish I was dead. Can’t come any too quick for me, I tell you.”

— Jack London

434. “She waited, she knew not for what, panting, with dry, burning lips, a leaping pulse, and a fever of expectancy in all her blood.”

— Jack London

435. “It was all well enough in the Southland, under the law of love and fellowshipm to respect private property and personal feelings; but in the Northland, under the law of club and fang, whoso took such things into account was a fool, and in so far as he observed them he would fail to prosper.”

— Jack London

436. “They may not know it, but it is a pose. In so far as they cultivate salient peculiarities, they cultivate falseness to themselves and live lies.”

— Jack London

437. “Christ told the rich young man to sell all he had,” Ernest said bitterly. “The Bishop obeyed Christ’s injunction and got locked up in a madhouse. Times have changed since Christ’s day. A rich man to-day who gives all he has to the poor is crazy. There is no discussion. Society has spoken.”

— Jack London

438. “He looked at her and saw her eyes luminous with pity. And then he remembered that he loved her and was lost in amazement at his fortune that permitted him to love her and to take her on his arm to a lecture.”

— Jack London

439. “The cub knew only that the sniff was strange, a something unclassified, therefore unknown and terrible – for the unknown was one of the chief elements that went into the making of fear.”

— Jack London

440. “La curiosidad, hija del crecimiento, era la que le impulsaba. la necesidad de aprender, de vivir, de hacer algo que le proporcionara experiencia.”

— Jack London

441. “It was easy. All men must die. He did not complain. It was the way of life, and it was just. He had been born close to the earth, close to the earth had he lived, and the law thereof was not new to him. It was the law of all flesh. Nature was not kindly to the flesh.”

— Jack London

442. “Martin knew of the enormous gulf between him and this man – the gulf the books had made; but he found no difficulty in crossing back over that gulf. He had lived all his life in the working- class world, and the CAMARADERIE of labor was second nature with him.”

— Jack London

443. “In his despondency, he concluded that he had no judgment whatever, that he was hypnotized by what he wrote, and that he was a self-deluded pretender.”

— Jack London

444. “Lobby – a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and corrupting the legislators who were supposed to represent the people’s interests.”

— Jack London

445. “She had never had any experiences of the heart. Her only experiences in such matters were of the books, where the facts of ordinary day were translated by fancy into a fairy realm of unreality;.”

— Jack London

446. “It was the worst hurt he had ever known.”

— Jack London