Quotes by Jack London

Life is a big gambling game. Some are born lucky and some are born unlucky.

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

Hawaii is a paradise -- and I can never cease proclaiming it; but I must append one word of qualification: Hawaii is a paradise for the well-to-do.

Don't write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.

She was pure, it was true, as he had never dreamed of purity; but cherries stained her lips.

Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time.

Limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.

Age is never so old as youth would measure it.

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.

The trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances.

He lacked the wisdom, and the only way for him to get it was to buy it with his youth; and when wisdom was his, youth would have been spent buying it.

Some sorts of truth are truer than others.

These women, capable of the most sublime emotions, of the tenderest sympathies, were openmouthed and screaming. They wanted to live, they were helpless, likes rats in a trap, and they screamed.

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

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

There are things greater than our wisdom, beyond our justice. The right and wrong of this we cannot say, and it is not for us to judge.

Avoid the unhappy ending, the harsh, the brutal, the tragic, the horrible -- if you care to see in print things you write. (In this connection don't do as I do, but do as I say.).

For there are roads and roads, and of truth there are orders and orders.

Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.

I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums.... All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me.... Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.

I am. I was. I am not. I never am.

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts upon itself? And it is of course overestimated, for it is of necessity prejudiced in its own favour.

A human life the treasure of the world cannot buy; nor can it redeem one which is misspent; nor can it make full and complete and beautiful a life which is dwarfed and warped and ugly.

Where they were not alive with rottenness, quick with unclean life, there were merely the unburied dead -- clean and noble, like well-preserved mummies, but not alive.

Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.

A man with a club is a law-maker.

Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club, and if you don't get it you will nonetheless get something that looks remarkably like it.

I am I. And I won't subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind.

In his gambling, he had one besetting weakness -- faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.

Desire is a pain which seeks easement through possession.

Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal.

John Barleycorn's inhibition rises like a wall between
one's immediate desires and long-learned morality.

If a company is distributing images and video then obviously they need bandwidth solutions. But if they are looking to the mass market then they must develop WAP sites.

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

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

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.

Merely because you have got something to say that may be of interest to others does not free you from making all due effort to express that something in the best possible medium and form.

Letter to Max E. Feckler, Oct. 26, 1914.

He was a large, fleshy man, weighing at least two hundred pounds, and he quickly became a faithful representation of a quivering jelly mountain of fat.

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

It was idle, he knew, to get between a fool and his folly; while two or three fools more or less would not alter the scheme of things.

Life's a game and men the gamblers. They'll stake their whole pile on the one chance in a thousand. Take away that one chance, and -- they won't play.

Food and fire, protection and companionship, were some of the things he received from the god. In return, he guarded the god's property, defended his body, worked for him, and obeyed him.

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

Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.

I would rather be ashes than dust. I would rather be a streaming meteor than a sleepy and permanent planet. I would rather burn out in a blaze of streaming glory than be stifled like dry rot. I shall use my time.

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

Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death.

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

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

I love the flesh. I'm a pagan. Who are they who speak evil of the clay? The very stars are made of clay like mine!

All the world is topsy-turvy, and it has been topsy-turvy ever since the plague.

It might be in a saloon with jingled townsmen, or with a genial railroad man well lighted up and armed with pocket flasks, or with a bunch of alki stiffs in a hang-out. Yes; and it might be in a prohibition state.

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.

Then one can't make a living out of poetry? Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.

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

Saints in heaven -- how could they be anything but fair and pure? No praise to them. But saints in slime -- ah, that was the everlasting wonder! That was what made life worth while.

She was thrilling to a desire that urged her to go forward, to be in closer to that fire, to be squabbling with the dogs, and to be avoiding and dodging the stumbling feet of men.

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

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

Life, in a sense, is living and surviving. And all that makes for living and surviving is good. He who follows the fact cannot go astray, while he who has no reverence for the fact wanders afar.

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

Cruelty, as a fine art, has attained its perfect flower in the trained-animal world.

My life shall be free and broad and great, and I will not be the slave to the sense delights which chained my ancient ancestry. I reject the heritage. I break the entail. And who are you to say I am unwise?

The Stone the Builders Rejected.

But under it all they were men, penetrating the land of desolation and mockery and silence, puny adventurers bent on colossal adventure, pitting themselves against the might of a world as remote and alien and pulseless as the abysses of space.

Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.

I did not begin when I was born, nor when I was conceived. I have been growing, developing, through incalculable myriads of millenniums... All my previous selves have their voices, echoes, promptings in me... Oh, incalculable times again shall I be born.

So that was the way. No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you.

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.

There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysicians.... Judge them by their works. What have they done for mankind beyond the spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own shadows for gods?

And, dying, he declined to die.

Strength is an empty shell.

Not all the monsters have fangs.

He was always striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.

Out of this pack-persecution he learned two important things: how to take care of himself in a mass-fight against him; and how, on a single dog, to inflict the greatest amount of damage in the briefest space of time.

They were firemakers! They were gods! humans.

It was the worst hurt he had ever known.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.

The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.

Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.