Jack London Quotes

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

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

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

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

Don’t dash off a six-thousand-word story before breakfast. Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sw...

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

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

I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated...

The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut t...

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

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

Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had first met on the blasted...

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no...

I am a sick man - oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care f...

Do you know, I sometimes, catch myself wishing that I too were blind to the facts of life and only k...

The proper function of man is to live-not to exist.

One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.

Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!...Oh, to just grip your handlebars and...

As I, my real self, grew older, I entered more and more into the substance of my dreams. One may dre...

The surpluses will have to be expended somehow, and trust the oligarchs to find a way. Magnificent r...

I would rather be ashes than dust!I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze ...

From Martin Eden on submitting manuscripts: "There was no human editor at the other end, but a mere ...

As the days went by, the evolution of like into love was accelerated.  White Fang himself began to g...

Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such pr...

However, he was happy. He felt he was conquering nature. He laughed aloud. He felt he was stronger t...

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

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

Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.

He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit whe...

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

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, ...

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will ...

Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college ...

It seemed so tawdry what he had offered her - mere money - compared with what she offered him. He of...

Beauty is the only master to serve.

But you don't hold yourself superior to all the judges of music?" she protested."No, no, not for a m...

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

Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back ...

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

He thanked God that she had been born and sheltered to such innocence. But he knew life, its foulnes...

He was disappointed in it all. He had developed into an alien. As the steam beer had tasted raw, so ...

Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than beauty in it, something more stingingl...

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

The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is th...

…and from that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.

But he is not always alone. When the long winter nights come on and the wolves follow their meat int...

He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separ...

He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, go...

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

Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line...

The Elsinore's bow tilted skyward while her stern fell into a foaming valley. Not a man had gained h...

Captain West advanced to meet me, and before our outstretched hands touched, before his face broke f...

Says O'Sullivan to me, "Mr. Fay, I'll have a word wid yeh?" "Certainly," says I; "what can I do for ...

Miss West is never idle. Below, in the big after-room, she does her own laundering. Nor will she let...

In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break, I found myself compel...

Perhaps the greatest charm of tramp-life is the absence of monotony. In Hobo Land the face of life i...

The fleeting systems lapse like foam,'" he mumbled what was evidently a quotation. "That's it—foam, ...

A pair of workman’s brogans encased my feet, and for trousers I was furnished with a pair of pale bl...

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated...

If they will only hold their hands until the season is over, he promises them a royal carnival, when...

This is the first time I have heard ‘ethics’ in the mouth of a man. You and I are the only men on th...

As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less t...

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.

So said Hair-Face, and they killed him, because, they said, he was a wild man and wanted to go back ...

Dark spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.

Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever...

The pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him ...

To man has been given the grief, often, of seeing his gods overthrown and his altars crumbling; but ...

Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.

He had no conscious knowledge of death, but like every animal of the Wild, he possessed the instinct...

Why didn’t you dare it before? he asked harshly.When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was...