Jack London: Trending quotes

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Jack London: 154 quotes47 likes

“You stand on dead men's legs. You've never had any of your own. You couldn't walk alone between two sunrises and hustle the meat for your belly”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea Wolf

“I was jealous; therefore I loved.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea Wolf

“I am. I was. I am not. I never am.”

Jack London book John Barleycorn

Source: John Barleycorn (1913), Ch. I

“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?”

Jack London book The Iron Heel

Ernest, Chapter One
The Iron Heel (1907)

“Life? Bah! It has no value. Of cheap things it is the cheapest.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

"The Sea-Wolf" (1904)

“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.”

Jack London book To Build a Fire

"To Build a Fire" published as a collection of short stories in the book Lost Face (1910)

“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. Take that man I had aloft. He held on as if he were a precious thing, a treasure beyond diamonds of rubies. To you? No. To me? Not at all. To himself? Yes. But I do not accept his estimate. He sadly overrates himself. There is plenty more life demanding to be born. Had he fallen and dripped his brains upon the deck like honey from the comb, there would have been no loss to the world. The supply is too large.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Wolf Larsen, Chapter Six
The Sea-Wolf (1904)

“Against the wall, near the head of the bunk, was a rack filled with books. I glanced over them, noting with astonishment such names as Shakespeare, Tennyson, Poe, and De Quincey. There were scientific works too, among which were represented men such as Tyndall, Proctor, and Darwin.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Van Weydon discovers Wolf Larsen's astonishing array of reading matter. Chapter Five
The Sea-Wolf (1904)

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

Jack London

Letter to Charles Warren Stoddard (21 August 1903)

“Age is never so old as youth would measure it.”

Jack London book The Wit of Porportuk

"The Wit of Porportuk" in The Best Short Stories of Jack London (1962) ISBN 0-449-30053-6

“Hist, now, between you an' meself and the stanchion there, this Wolf Larsen is a regular devil, an' the Ghost'll be a hell ship like she's always been since he had hold iv her.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Six

“Such is my outlook. I look forward to a time when man shall progress upon something worthier and higher than his stomach, when there will be a finer incentive to impel men to action than the incentive of to-day, which is the incentive of the stomach. I retain my belief in the nobility and excellence of the human. I believe that spiritual sweetness and unselfishness will conquer the gross gluttony of to-day. And last of all, my faith is in the working-class. As some Frenchman has said, "The stairway of time is ever echoing with the wooden shoe going up, the polished boot descending."”

Jack London

What Life Means to Me (1905), in Revolution and Other Essays (Macmillan, 1909)

“I was five years old the first time I got drunk.”

Jack London book John Barleycorn

Source: John Barleycorn (1913), Ch. III

“It was patent that this terrible man was no ignorant clod, such as one would inevitably suppose him to be from his exhibitions of brutality. At once he became an enigma.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Five

“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.”

Jack London

"An Odyssey of the North" in The Best Short Stories of Jack London (1962) ISBN 0-449-30053-6

“But especially he loved to run in the dim twilight of the summer midnights, listening to the subdued and sleepy murmurs of the forest, reading signs and sounds as a man may read a book, and seeking for the mysterious something that called -- called, waking or sleeping, at all times, for him to come.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild (1903)

“My first thought was that a man who had come through a collision and rubbed shoulders with death merited more attention than I received.”

Jack London book The Sea-Wolf

Source: The Sea-Wolf (1904), Chapter Two

“…men, groping in the Arctic darkness, had found a yellow metal, and because steamship and transportation companies were booming the find, thousands of men were rushing into the Northland. These men wanted dogs, and the dogs they wanted were heavy dogs, with strong muscles by which to toil, and furry coats to protect them from the frost.”

Jack London book Call of the Wild

The Call of the Wild (1903)

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

Jack London Martin Eden

Source: Martin Eden (1909), Ch. XXXII