“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)
“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 fulfilment.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Jack London – 22 Adventure Classics in One Volume (Illustrated): The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, Burning Daylight, The Scarlet Plague, A Son of the Sun, The Valley of the Moon, The Star Rover, Hearts of Three…
“Some sorts of truth are truer than others.”
Source: John Barleycorn
“Love is the sum of all the arts, as it is the reason for their existence.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)
“Pursuit and possession are accompanied by states of consciousness so wide apart that they can never be united.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)
“A good joke will sell quicker than a good poem, and, measured in sweat and blood, will bring better remuneration.”
Source: No Mentor But Myself: Jack London on Writers and Writing
“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.”
Source: The Complete Novels of Jack London – 22 Adventure Classics in One Volume (Illustrated): The Call of the Wild, The Sea-Wolf, White Fang, The Iron Heel, Martin Eden, Burning Daylight, The Scarlet Plague, A Son of the Sun, The Valley of the Moon, The Star Rover, Hearts of Three…
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)
“The loneliness of the man is slowly being borne in upon me. There is not a man aboard but hates or fears him, nor is there a man whom he does not despise.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of Jack London (Illustrated)
“I was five years old the first time I got drunk.”
Source: John Barleycorn