Tag: Jack London

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.

Jack London

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

Jack London

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

Jack London

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

Jack London

“Then one can’t make a living out of poetry?”

“Certainly not. What fool expects to? Out of rhyming, yes.”

“Let beauty be your end. Why should you mint beauty into gold? Anyway, you can’t.”

Jack London

The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right.

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 on 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. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move.

Jack London

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

Jack London

Is this true?  I’ll have to think about this one.

“The most beautiful stories always start with wreckage.”

Jack London

Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.

Jack London