Jack London Quotes

But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. Religion passes them by. The Unseen holds for them neither terror nor delight. They are unaware of the Unseen; and the full belly and the evening pipe, with their regular “arf an’ arf,” is all they demand, or dream of demanding, from existence.

Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.

He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in their significances.

But he knew life, its foulness as well as its fairness, its greatness in spite of the slime that infested it, and by God he was going to have his say on it to the world. 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. To see moral grandeur rising out of cesspools of iniquity; to rise himself and first glimpse beauty, faint and far, through mud- dripping eyes; to see out of weakness, and frailty, and viciousness, and all abysmal brutishness, arising strength, and truth, and high spiritual endowment.

I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.

Mercedes nursed a special grievance - the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless. They complained. Upon which impeachment of what to her was her most essential sex pregorative, she made their lives unendurable.

"I'll have you know I do the swearing on this ship. If I need your assitance I'll call you." Capt. Wolf Larsen

"Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form."

[Letter to Max E. Feckler, Oct. 26, 1914]

I was five years old the first time I got drunk.

He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.

It's better to stand by someone's side than by yourself

The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.

Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.

He was beaten (he knew that); but he was not broken.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.