Jack London

“Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.”
-- Jack London

#Tattoo #Past #Men

“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

#Inspirational #Life #Ambition

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
-- Jack London

#Funny #Witty #Life Changing

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

#Sleep #Atoms #Meteors

“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

#Dog #Generosity #Giving

“Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
-- Jack London

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.”
-- Jack London

#Strong #Predator #Killers

“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

#Thinking #Law #Meat

“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

#Zero #Men #Imagination

“The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.”
-- Jack London

#Stills

“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

#Song #Heart #Years

“Ever bike? Now that's something that makes life worth living!...Oh, to just grip your handlebars and lay down to it, and go ripping and tearing through streets and road, over railroad tracks and bridges, threading crowds, avoiding collisions, at twenty miles or more an hour, and wondering all the time when you're going to smash up. Well, now, that's something! And then go home again after three hours of it...and then to think that tomorrow I can do it all over again!”
-- Jack London

#Home #Thinking #Bridges

“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

#Fire #Forests #Earth

“To have a full stomach, to daze lazily in the sunshine--such things were remuneration in full for his adors and toils, while his ardors and toils were in themselves self-remunerative. They were expressions of life, and life is always happy when it is expressing itself.”
-- Jack London

#Sunshine #Self #Expression

“The function of man is to live, not to exist.”
-- Jack London

#Men #Function

“To be able to forget means sanity.”
-- Jack London

#Mean #Able #Forget

“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

#War #Thinking #Artist

“Life is so short. I would rather sing one song than interpret the thousand.”
-- Jack London

#Song #Life Is #Life Is So Short

“If cash comes with fame, come fame; if cash comes without fame, come cash.”
-- Jack London

#Cash #Fame

“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.”
-- Jack London

#Alive #Paradox #Mark

“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

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

“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

#Dog #Laughter #Sadness

“He was always striving to attain it. The life that was so swiftly expanding within him, urged him continually toward the wall of light. The life that was within him knew that it was the one way out, the way he was predestined to tread.”
-- Jack London

#Wall #Light #Way

“But it did not all happen in a day, this giving over of himself, body and soul, to the man-animals. He could not immediately forego his wild heritage and his memories of the Wild. There were days when he crept to the edge of the forest and stood and listened to something calling him far and away.”
-- Jack London

#Memories #Men #Animal

“It was the worst hurt he had ever known.”
-- Jack London

#Hurt #Worst

“White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong.”
-- Jack London

#Strong #Law #White

“His conclusion was that things were not always what they appeared to be. The cub's fear of the unknown was an inherited distrust, and it had now been strengthened by experience. Thenceforth, in the nature of things, he would possess an abiding distrust of appearances.”
-- Jack London

#Abiding #Fear Of The Unknown #Appearance

“Thus it was that in obedience to the law laid down by his mother, and in obedience to the law of that unknown and nameless thing, fear, he kept away from the mouth of the cave.”
-- Jack London

#Mother #Law #Caves

“They were firemakers! They were gods! [humans]”
-- Jack London

#Humans

“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