Quotes
- “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.”
- “Life is not always a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.”
- “You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”
- “Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.”
- “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.”
- “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.”
- “He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.”
- “The wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept.”
- “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.”
- “To be able to forget means sanity.”
- “He had no conscious knowledge of love. And no power to express it.”
- “He felt strangely numb. As though from a great distance he was regarding himself.”
- “Life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.”
- “The call of the wild was sounding in his heart.”
- “There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise.”
- “He had killed man, the noblest game of all, and he had killed in the face of the law of club and fang.”
- “The wages of dying are love and peace.”
- “The old weakness, the old reluctance, was there, like a faded flower pressed between the leaves of a book.”
- “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.”
- “But he was fighting with a mountain as well as with the dogs and the man, and it was this that made the fight harder.”
- “He was a man of faith and fervor – a man of ideals.”
- “They were his own kind, and they were no longer afraid of him. There was something in the call that was unanswerable and overpowering.”
- “He was real. He was alive. And he was free.”
- “The man's eyes revealed a capacity for that cold cruelty of which only a wild animal is capable.”
- “He was a man of great strength and endurance.”
- “But a man should be able to play a good game of cards even with a poor hand.”
- “He loved the chase and the danger of the hunt.”
- “He was a man who could endure pain and suffering without complaint.”
- “He felt the call of the wild, the call of the wild places, and it stirred something deep within him.”
