Jack London Quotes

I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.

Pioneers may be picturesque figures, but they are often rather lonely ones.

After a sheltered life, I went the other way. I wanted to prove how tough I was.

Withough danger you cannot go beyond danger.

Sometimes luck is with you, and sometimes not, but the important thing is to take the dare. Those who climb mountains or raft rivers understand this.

Go back?" he thought. "No good at all! Go sideways? Impossible! Go forward? Only thing to do! On we go!" So up he got, and trotted along with his little sword held in front of him and one hand feeling the wall, and his heart all of a patter and a pitter.

I felt that if a man's proposals met with approval, it should encourage him; if they met with opposition, it should make him fight back; but the real tragedy for him was to lift up his voice among the living and meet with no response neither approval nor opposition just as if he were left helpless in a boundless desert.

Loneliness is an aspect of the land.

It is the swimmer who first leaps into the frozen stream who is cut sharpest by the ice; those who follow him find it broken, and the last find it gone. It is the men or women who first tread down the path which the bulk of humanity will ultimately follow, who must find themselves at last in solitudes where the silence is deadly.

A man of my acquaintance once wrote a poem called "The Road Less Traveled", describing a journey he took through the woods along a path most travelers never used. The poet found that the road less traveled was peaceful but quite lonely, and he was probably a bit nervous as he went along, because if anything happened on the road less traveled, the other travelers would be on the road more frequently traveled and so couldn't hear him as he cried for help. Sure enough, that poet is dead.

With a nearly desperate sense of isolation and a growing suspicion that I lived in an alien land, I took to the road in search of places where change did not mean ruin and where time and men and deeds connected.

Life has to be dangerous.

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.

The best an American can look forward to is the lonely pleasure of one who stands at long last on a chilly and inhospitable mountaintop where few have been before, where few can follow and where few will consent to believe he has been.

I've never been afraid of much, and like any normal kid, I liked to push the limits of what I could do.

My dad taught me never to be afraid of what's on the other side of the mountain.

I'm facing Niagara Falls - the wind and the mist and the dark and the peregrine falcons - and I'm going to stay focused on the other side.

I have always had the courage for the new things that life sometimes offers.

When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.

Right now, they feel they have lost their voice, and their miseries have increased since my departure.

Being a pathfinder is to be willing to risk failure and still go on.

Unfortunately, there are so many people who live their whole life in a place that is safe and protected and simple and they don't really have that strength inside to fly.

At the narrow passage there is no brother and no friend

I think my whole life has been one of sort of daring, and sort of sailing against the wind instead of just going with the wind.

I have been hated by the whole world and it's been something to definitely overcome.