Top 15 Jack London Quotes

You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.

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

I'd rather sing one wild song and burst my heart with it, than live a thousand years watching my digestion and being afraid of the wet.

The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars.

I would rather be ashes than dust!
I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
The function of man is to live, not to exist.
I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them.
I shall use my time.

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.

Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive.
This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.

Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

To be able to forget means sanity.

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.