Jack London Quotes

I think there's a bit of the devil in everybody. There's a bit of a priest in everybody, too, but I enjoyed playing the devil more. He was more fun.

I think we all have the capacity of evil in us.

No one is above temptation. No one is above life in general.

One big vice in a man is apt to keep out a great many smaller ones.

Those who see and observe kings, heroes, and statesmen, discover that they have headaches, indigestion, humors and passions, just like other people; every one of which in their turns determine their wills in defiance of their reason.

Temptation does not make the sin, it lies ready in the heart.

It is a very melancholy reflection that men are usually so weak that it is absolutely necessary for them to know sorrow and pain to be in their right senses.

But when to sin our biased nature leans, The careful Devil is still at hand with means; And providently pimps for ill desires.

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

Princes rule the people, and their own passions rule Princes; but Providence can over-rule the whole, and draw the instruments of his inscrutable purposes from the vices, no less than the virtues of Kings.

Nothing in the world is so incontinent as a man's accursed appetite.

Of all creatures that breathe and move upon the earth, nothing is bred that is weaker than man.

No man's body is as strong as his appetites, but Heaven has corrected the boundlessness of his voluptuous desires by stinting his strength and contracting his capacities.

The desire of perfection became the ruling passion of their soul; and it is well known, that while reason embraces a cold mediocrity, our passions hurry us, with rapid violence, over the space which lies between the most opposite extremes.

There's a basic human weakness inherent in all people which tempts them to bitterly want what they can't have and ungratefully not want what is readily available to them.

Every man has his price. This is not true. But for every man there exists a bait which he cannot resist swallowing.

Evil into the mind of god or man may come and go, so unapproved, and leave no spot or blame behind.

This body of ours has one fault: the more you indulge it, the more things it discovers to be essential to it. It is extraordinary how it likes being indulged.

Every man has his devilish minutes.

Oh, what a wicked world it is that drives a man to sin.

But knowledge does not protect one. Life is contemptuous of knowledge; it forces it to sit in the anterooms, to wait outside. Passion, energy, lies: these are what life admires. Still, anything can be endured if all humanity is watching. The martyrs prove it. We live in the attention of others. We turn to it as flowers to the sun.

There is no man so great as not to have some littleness more predominant than all his greatness. Our virtues are the dupes, and often only the plaything of our follies.

Lust is a sharp spur to vice, which always putteth the affections into a false gallop.

There is a little bit of evil in all of us, and it's very easy to draw that out.