Jack London Quotes

Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.

Man always gets less than he demands from life.

This is the first time I have heard ‘ethics’ in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on this ship that know its meaning. At one time in my life, I dreamed that I might someday talk with men who used such language, that I might lift myself out of the place in life in which I had been born, and hold conversation and mingle with men who talked about just such things as ethics.

DARK SPRUCE FOREST FROWNED ON EITHER SIDE THE FROZEN WATERWAY. The trees had been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and they seemed to lean towards each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness — a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.

To have a full stomach, to daze lazily in the sunshine — such things were remuneration in full for his adors and toils, while his ardors and toils were in themselves self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.

There was nothing the matter with them except they were dead tired. It was not the dead-tiredness that comes through brief and excessive effort, from which recovery is a matter of hours; but it was the dead-tiredness that comes through the slow and prolonged strength drainage of months of toil.

My vision is clear and far. I could almost believe in God. But" - and his voice changed and the light went out of his face - "what is this condition in which I find myself? This joy of living? This exultation of life? This inspiration, I may well call it? It comes when there is nothing wrong with one's digestion, when the stomach is in trim and and his appetite has an edge, and all goes well.

And so it came that White Fang learned that the right to punish was something the gods reserved for themselves and denied to the lesser creatures under them.

He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.

He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.

Strength is an empty shell. One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself. Show me a man with a tattoo, and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.