Top 182 Quotes & Sayings by Jack London

If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.

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

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

Affluence means influence.

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

Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?

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 them. I shall use my time.

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

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

Do you know the only value life has is what life puts on itself?

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

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

The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.

With the aurora borealis flaming coldly overhead, or the stars leaping in the frost dance, and the land numb and frozen under its pall of snow, this song of the huskies might have been the defiance of life, only it was pitched in minor key, with long-drawn wailings and half-sobs, and was more the pleading of life, the articulate travail of existence. It was an old song, old as the breed itself--one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.

There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. 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. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad in a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight.

The Law is a lie, and through it men lie most shamelessly.

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

Desire is a pain which seeks easement through possession.

The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.

The greatest of the arts is the conquering of men.

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

It is a simple matter to see the obvious, to do the expected. The tendency of the individual life is to be static rather than dynamic, and this tendency is made into a propulsion by civilization, where the obvious only is seen, and the unexpected rarely happens. When the unexpected does happen, however, and when it is of sufficiently grave import, the unfit perish. They do not see what is not obvious, are unable to do the unexpected, are incapable of adjusting their well-grooved lives to other and strange grooves. In short, when they come to the end of their own groove, they die.

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

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

The grapes on a score of rolling hills are red with autumn flame. Across Sonoma Mountain wisps of sea fog are stealing. The afternoon sun smoulders in the drowsy sky. I have everything to make me glad I am alive. I am filled with dreams and mysteries. I am all sun and air and sparkle. I am vitalized, organic.

The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.

And how have I lived? Frankly and openly, though crudely. I have not been afraid of life. I have not shrunk from it. I have taken it for what it was at its own valuation. And I have not been ashamed of it. Just as it was, it was mine.

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

Age is never so old as youth would measure it.

Love cannot in its very nature be peaceful or content. It is a restlessness, an unsatisfaction. I can grant a lasting love just as I can grant a lasting unsatisfaction; but the lasting love cannot be coupled with possession, for love is pain and desire and possession is easement and fulfilment.

You look back and see how hard you worked and how poor you were, and how desperately anxious you were to succeed, and all you can remember is how happy you were.

Not all the monsters have fangs.

Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.

I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.

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

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

To be able to forget means sanity.

In a saturated population life is always cheap.

I would rather be ashes than dust.

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.

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

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

Some sorts of truth are truer than others.

I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.

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.

Limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.

There's only one way to make a beginning, and that is to begin; and begin with hard work, and patience, prepared for all the disappoint­ment s.

It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.

Deep in the forest a call was sounding, and as often as he heard this call, mysteriously thrilling and luring, he felt compelled to turn his back upon the fire and the beaten earth around it, and to plunge into the forest, and on and on, he knew not where or why; nor did he wonder where or why, the call sounding imperiously, deep in the forest.

Go strip off your clothes that are a nuisance in this mellow clime. Get in and wrestle with the sea; wing your heels with the skill and power that reside in you, hit the sea's breakers, master them, and ride upon their backs as a king should.

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

Bog-lights, vapors of mysticism, psychic overtones, soul orgies, wailings among the shadows, weird gnosticisms, veils and tissues of words, gibbering subjectivisms, gropings and maunderings, ontological fantasies ... this is the stuff, the phantasms of hope, that fills your book shelves. Look at them, all the sad wraiths of sad mad men and passionate rebels — your Schopenhauers, your Strindbergs, your Tolstois and Nietzsches. Come. Your glass is empty. Fill and forget.

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

Strength is an empty shell.

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.

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

A man with a club is a law-maker.