Quotes from Jack London

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

No, sir. Go to hell sir. It's the best I can do for you sir.

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.

And at the instant he knew, he ceased to know.

limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.

The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.

He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct of death. To him it stood as the greatest of hurts. It was the very essence of the unknown; it was the sum of the terrors of the unknown, the one culminating and unthinkable catastrophe that could happen to him, about which he knew nothing and about which he feared everything.

His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.

This expression of abandon and surrender, of absolute trust, he reserved for the master alone.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance, he was aware that he was being beaten. The last sensations of pain left him. He no longer felt anything, though very faintly he could hear the impact of the club upon his body. But it was no longer his body, it seemed so far away.

He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.

But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.

But, – and there it is, – we want to live and move, though we have no reason to, because it happens that it is the nature of life to live and move, to want to live and move. If it were not for this, life would be dead. It is because of this life that is in you that you dream of your immortality.

Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.

He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in which caresses and affection and the bright sweetness of spirit did not exist.

The function of man is to live, not to exist.

There is a patience of the wild--dogged, tireless, persistent as life itself--that holds motionless for endless hours the spider in its web, the snake in its coils, the panther in its ambuscade; this patience belongs peculiarly to life when it hunts its living food;

My mistake was in ever opening the books.

The hand descended. Nearer and nearer it came. It touched the ends of his upstanding hair. He shrank down under it. It followed down after him, pressing more closely against him. Shrinking, almost shivering. He still managed to hold himself together. It was a torment, this hand that touched him and violated his instinct. He could not forget in a day all the evil that had been wrought him at the hands of men.

Every book was a peep-hole into the realm of knowledge. His hunger fed upon what he read, and increased.

They were not half living, or quarter living. They were simply so many bags of bones in which sparks of life fluttered faintly.

He must master or be mastered; while to show mecy was a weakness. Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death. Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time, he obeyed.