American author (1876-1916)
Pursuit and possession are accompanied by states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
The life that is demanding to be born is limitless. Nature is a spendthrift. Look at the fish and their millions of eggs. For that matter, look at you and me. In our loins are the possibilities of millions of lives. Could we but find time and opportunity and utilize the last bit and every bit of the unborn life that is in us, we could become the fathers of nations and populate continents.
JACK LONDON
The Sea-Wolf
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.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
I am. I was. I am not. I never am.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
Nature has many tricks wherewith she convinces man of his finity--the ceaseless flow of the tides, the fury of the storm, the shock of the earthquake, the long roll of heaven's artillery--but the most tremendous, the most stupefying of all, is the passive phase of the White Silence. All movement ceases, the sky clears, the heavens are as brass; the slightest whisper seems sacrilege, and man becomes timid, affrighted at the sound of his own voice. Sole speck of life journeying across the ghostly wastes of a dead world, he trembles at his audacity, realizes that his is a maggot's life, nothing more. Strange thoughts arise unsummoned, and the mystery of all things strives for utterance. And the fear of death, of God, of the universe comes over him--the hope of the Resurrection and the Life, the yearning for immortality, the vain striving of the imprisoned essence--it is then, if ever, man walks alone with God.
JACK LONDON
"The White Silence"
A man with a club is a law-maker.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
Desire is a pain which seeks easement through possession.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Alcohol tells truth, but its truth is not normal.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
The great task demanded of man is reproduction. He is urged by passion to perform this task. Passion, working through the imagination, produces love. Passion is the impelling factor, imagination the disturbing factor; and the disturbance of passion by imagination produces love.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
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
"Getting Into Print", The Editor Magazine, 1903
In what other land save this one is the commonest form of greeting not "Good day," nor "How d'ye do," but "Love"? That greeting is Aloha--love, I love you, my love to you. Good day--what is it more than an impersonal remark about the weather? How do you do--it is personal in a merely casual interrogative sort of a way. But Aloha! It is a positive affirmation of the warmth of one's own heart-giving. My love to you! I love you! Aloha!
JACK LONDON
My Hawaiian Aloha
The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters
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
"The Unexpected", Love of Life and Other Stories
It is good that man should accept at face value the cheats of sense and snares of flesh, and through the fogs of sentiency pursue the lures and lies of passion.
JACK LONDON
John Barleycorn
Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.
JACK LONDON
attributed, Art on Skin: Tattoos, Style, and the Human Canvas
In his gambling, he had one besetting weakness -- faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.
JACK LONDON
The Call of the Wild
Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.
JACK LONDON
The Valley of the Moon
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.
JACK LONDON
White Fang
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
The Kempton-Wace Letters
Comes the lover, tricked by nature, blind of passion, impelled madly toward the loved one. He is as blind to her salient imperfections as he is to her petty vices. He does not interrogate her disposition and temperament, or speculate as to how they will coordinate with his for two score years and odd. He questions nothing, desires nothing, save to possess her. And this is the paradox: By nature he is driven to contract a temporary tie, which, by social observance and demand, must endure for a lifetime.
JACK LONDON
The Kempton-Wace Letters