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Jack London Quotes
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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
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If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.
Jack London
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Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
Jack London
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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 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.
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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.
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One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.
Jack London
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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.
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I should not care to revisit all these fair places of the world except in the fashion I visited them before. Glass in hand!
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The game of life is good, though all of life may be hurt, and though all lives lose the game in the end.
Jack London
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Man is a flux of states of consciousness, a flow of passing thoughts, each thought of self another self, a myriad thoughts, a myriad selves, a continual becoming but never being, a will-of-the-wisp flitting of ghosts in ghostland.
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And not only did he learn by experience, but instincts long dead became alive again. The domesticated generations fell from him. In vague ways he remembered back to the youth of the breed, to the time the wild dogs ranged in packs through the primeval forest and killed their meat as they ran it down.
Jack London
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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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I was carrying a beautiful alcoholic conflagration around with me. The thing fed on its own heat and flamed the fiercer. There was no time, in all my waking time, that I didn't want a drink. I began to anticipate the completion of my daily thousand words by taking a drink when only five hundred words were written. It was not long until I prefaced the beginning of the thousand words with a drink.
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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.
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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.
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As for the primitive, I hark back to it because we are still very primitive. How many thousands of years of culture, think you, have rubbed and polished at our raw edges? One probably; at the best, no more than two. And that takes us back to screaming savagery, when, gross of body and deed, we drank blood from the skulls of our enemies, and hailed as highest paradise the orgies and carnage of Valhalla.
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I know that at the time I was confident, I had discovered the formula for squaring the circle; but I resolutely deferred the working of it out until after the examinations. Then I would show them.
Jack London
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Buck did not read the newspapers, or he would have known that trouble was brewing, not alone for himself, but for every tide-water dog, strong of muscle and with warm, long hair, from Puget Sound to San Diego.
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Concerning his own rages, I am convinced that they are not real, that they are sometimes experiments, but that in the main they are the habits of a pose or attitude he has seen fit to take toward his fellowman.
Jack London
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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.
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And through it all, calm and impassive, leaning on his elbow and gazing down, Wolf Larsen seemed lost in a great curiosity. This wild stirring of yeasty life, this terrific revolt and defiance of matter that moved, perplexed and interested him.
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And when, on the still cold nights, he pointed his nose at a star and howled long and wolflike, it was his ancestors, dead and dust, pointing nose at star and howling down through the centuries and through him.
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The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.
Jack London
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There is such a thing as anesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.
Jack London
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For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.
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Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.
Jack London
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Of her own experience she had no memory of the thing happening; but in her instinct, which was the experience of all mothers of wolves, there lurked a memory of fathers that had eaten their new-born and helpless progeny.
Jack London
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Quote of the day
It would be a poor thing to be an atom in a world without physicists. And physicists are made of atoms. A physicist is an atom's way of knowing about atoms.
George Wald
Jack London
Creative Commons
Born:
January 12, 1876
Died:
November 22, 1916
(aged 40)
Bio:
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American novelist, journalist, and social activist.
Known for:
The Call of the Wild (1903)
The Sea-Wolf (1904)
Martin Eden (1909)
The Iron Heel (1908)
To Build a Fire (1902)
Most used words:
life
man
wild
body
law
living
live
dogs
wolf
forest
god
lived
pain
born
fear
Jack London on Wikipedia
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