Quotes from Jack London

The fortunate man is the one who cannot take more than a couple of drinks without becoming intoxicated. The unfortunate wight is the one who can take many glasses without betraying a sign; who must take numerous glasses in order to get the 'kick'.

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

It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a coward beg for life.

Beauty is the only master to serve.

It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the doing of it. 

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

They were firemakers! They were gods! [humans]

They were his environment, these men, and they were moulding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature. Nevertheless, Nature had given him plasticity. Where many another animal would have died or had its spirit broken, he adjusted himself and lived, and at no expense of the spirit.

At once he became an enigma. One side or the other of his nature was perfectly comprehensible; but both sides together were bewildering.

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

Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing.

Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world.

I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of a man is to live, not to exist. Jack London

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed.

Wolf - tis what he is. He's not blackhearted like some men. 'Tis no heart he has at all.

No man can be intellectually insulted. Insult, in its very nature, is emotional.

He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn.

Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery.

There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.

directing their narrow little lives by narrow little formulas—herd-creatures, flocking together and patterning their lives by one another's opinions, failing of being individuals and of really living life because of the childlike formulas by which they were enslaved. 

Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.

What did you have in you? - some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.

But there were other forces at work in the cub, the greatest of which was growth. Instinct and law demanded of him obedience. But growth demanded disobedience...In the end, one day, fear and obedience were swept away by the rush of life, and the cub straddled and sprawled toward the entrance.

In dim ways he recognized in man the animal that had fought itself to primacy over the other animals of the Wild. Not alone out of his own eyes, but out of the eyes of all his ancestors was the cub now looking upon man.