John Griffith London was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist. A pioneer of commercial fiction and American magazines, he was one of the first American authors to become an international celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing. He was also an innovator in the genre that would later become known as science fiction. These Jack London quotes will motivate you.
Best Jack London Quotes
- “Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.” ~ Jack London
- “I do not live for what the world thinks of me, but for what I think of myself.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.” ~ Jack London
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“Limited minds can recognize limitations only in others.” ~ Jack London
- “You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “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 disappointÂment s.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
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“Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “Not all the monsters have fangs.” ~ Jack London
- “Fear urged him to go back, but growth drove him on.” ~ Jack London
- “It is so much easier to live placidly and complacently. Of course, to live placidly and complacently is not to live at all.” ~ Jack London
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“The function of man is to live, not to exist.” ~ Jack London
- “Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.” ~ Jack London
- “Age is never so old as youth would measure it.” ~ Jack London
- “One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.” ~ Jack London , Jack London Quotes about nature
- “Affluence means influence.” ~ Jack London
- “Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.” ~ Jack London
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“The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “Socialism, when the last word is said, is merely a new economic and political system whereby more men can get food to eat.” ~ Jack London
- “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 fulfillment.” ~ Jack London
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“I would rather be ashes than dust.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
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“Darn the wheel of the world! Why must it continually turn over? Where is the reverse gear?” ~ Jack London
- “Desire is a pain which seeks easement through possession.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
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“The word is too weak. There is no word in the language strong enough to describe my feelings.” ~ Jack London
- “Man rarely places a proper valuation upon his womankind, at least not until deprived of them.” ~ Jack London
- “Some sorts of truth are truer than others.” ~ Jack London
- “To be able to forget means sanity.” ~ Jack London
- “Don’t write too much. Concentrate your sweat on one story, rather than dissipate it over a dozen.” ~ Jack London , Jack London Quotes about writing
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“Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten, was the law; and this mandate, down out of the depths of Time.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “The greatest of the arts is the conquering of men.” ~ Jack London
- “There are, broadly speaking, two types of drinkers. There is the man whom we all know, stupid, unimaginative, whose brain is bitten numbly by numb maggots; who walks generously with wide-spread, tentative legs, falls frequently in the gutter, and who sees, in the extremity of his ecstasy, blue mice and pink elephants…. The other type of drinker has imagination, vision. Even when most pleasantly jingled he walks straight and naturally, never staggers nor falls, and knows just where he is and what he is doing. It is not his body but his brain that is drunken.” ~ Jack London
- “If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.” ~ Jack London
- “I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot.” ~ Jack London
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“In a saturated population life is always cheap.” ~ Jack London
- “Having no new companions, nothing remained for him but to read.” ~ Jack London
- “I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.” ~ Jack London , Jack London Quotes on death
- “But I am I. And I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind” ~ Jack London
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“He was a silent fury who no torment could tame.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
- “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.” ~ Jack London
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“The scab is a traitor to his God, his mother, and his class.” ~ Jack London
- “The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten.” ~ Jack London , Jack London quotes about life
- “A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.” ~ Jack London
- “You have grudged the very fire in your house because the wood cost overmuch!” he cried. “You have grudged life. To live cost overmuch, and you have refused to pay the price. Your life has been like a cabin where the fire is out and there are no blankets on the floor.” He signaled to a slave to fill his glass, which he held aloft. “But I have lived. And I have been warm with life as you have never been warm. It is true, you shall live long. But the longest nights are the cold nights when a man shivers and lies awake. My nights have been short, but I have slept warm” ~ Jack London
- “Mercy did not exist in the primordial life. It was misunderstood for fear, and such misunderstandings made for death.” ~ Jack London
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“The ghostly winter silence had given way to the great spring murmur of awakening life.” ~ Jack London
- “A man with a club is a law-maker.” ~ Jack London
- “Pursuit and possession are accompanied by states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.” ~ Jack London
- “As for me, you wonder why I am a socialist. I’ll tell you. It is because socialism is inevitable; because the present rotten and irrational system cannot endure; because the day is past for your man on horseback. The slaves won’t stand for it. They are too many, and willy-nilly they’ll drag down the would-be equestrian before he gets astride. You can’t get away from them, and you’ll have to swallow the whole slave-morality. It’s not a nice mess, I’ll allow. But it’s been a-brewing and swallow it you must.” ~ Jack London
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“Everything is good . . . as long as it is unpossessed. Satiety and possession are Death’s horses they run in span.” ~ Jack London
- “A good soldier is a blind, heartless, soulless, murderous machine. He is not a man. His is not a brute, for brutes kill only in self defense. All that is human in him, all that is divine in him, all that constitutes the man has been sworn away when he took the enlistment roll. His mind, his conscience, aye, his very soul, are in the keeping of his officer. No man can fall lower than a soldier-it is a depth beneath which we cannot go.” ~ Jack London
- “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. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.” ~ Jack London
- “A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of laughter more terrible than any sadness-a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.” ~ Jack London
