Quotes from Jack London

It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. 

With the last remnant of his strength

The facts of life took on a fiercer aspect; and while he faced that aspect uncowed, he faced it with all the latent cunning of his nature aroused.

Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.

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

What is not good enough for you is not good enough for other men, and there's no more to be said.

I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.

Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged.

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.

It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.

it should serve as a warning to those rash political theorists of to-day who speak with certitude of social processes. Capitalism

John Barleycorn makes his appeal to weakness and failure, to weariness and exhaustion. He is the easy way out. And he is lying all the time. He offers false strength to the body, false elevation to the spirit, making things seem what they are not and vastly fairer than what they are.

My mind to me a kingdom is. That's another way of saying that you live up in the air. But you come back to earth at meal-time, I am sure, or when an earthquake happens along.

This first theft marked Buck as fit to survive in the hostile Northland environment. It marked his adaptability, his capacity to adjust himself to changing conditions, the lack of which would have meant swift and terrible death. It marked, further, the decay or going to pieces of his moral nature, a vain thing and a handicap in the ruthless struggle for existence.

Again from its brumal sleep

Like had been replaced by love. And love was the plummet dropped down into the deeps of him where like had never gone. And responsive out of his deeps had come the new thing—love. That which was given unto him did he return. This was a god indeed, a love–god, a warm and radiant god, in whose light White Fang's nature expanded as a flower expands under the sun.

A soldier, as Bernard Shaw has said, "ostensibly a heroic and patriotic defender of his country, is really an unfortunate man driven by destitution to offer himself as food for powder for the sake of regular rations, shelter, and clothing.

Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one's most sane conclusions.

In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death.

Don't loaf around and wait for inspiration. Light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it, you will get something that looks remarkably like it.

I had lone, schooled myself to be oblivious to pain. I had neither doubts nor fears. All the content of my mind seemed to be an absolute faith in the overlordship of the mind. This passivity was almost dream-like, and yet, in its way, it was positive almost to a pitch of exaltation.

I chanced the chest and the slow-beating heart. The quick compulsion of my will was rewarded. I no longer had chest nor heart. I was only a mind, a soul, a consciousness—call it what you will—incorporate in a nebulous brain that, while it still centered inside my skull, was expanded, and was continuing to expand, beyond my skull.

In years and years not one of them has been in contact with a good woman, or within the influence, or redemption, which irresistibly radiates from such a creature.  There

Beauty Smith was cruel in the way that cowards are cruel…he revenged himself, in turn, upon creatures weaker than he. 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.