Jack London Quotes

Caught between glass and wood, that which breaks and that which bends, that which sings and that which survive. So our lives go.

When life is victorious, there is birth; when it is thwarted, there is death. A warrior is always engaged in a life-and-death struggle for Peace.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

All species capable of grasping this fact manage better in the struggle for existence than those which rely upon their own strength alone: the wolf, which hunts in a pack, has a greater chance of survival than the lion, which hunts alone.

We are living in a very tough neighborhood where there is no mercy for the weak.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

No, no! I do nature injustice. She gave us inventive faculty, and set us naked, and helpless on the shore of this great ocean,--the world; swim those who can, the heavy may go to the bottom.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

He who would live must fight. He who doesn't wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history. Only the strong, only the industrious, only the determined, only the courageous, only the visionary who determine the real nature of our struggle can possibly survive.

Lonely's like any other organism; competitive and resourceful in the struggle to perpetuate itself.

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.

It isn't important to come out on top, what matters is to be the one who comes out alive.

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

The strongest oak of the forest is not the one that is protected from the storm and hidden from the sun. It’s the one that stands in the open where it is compelled to struggle for its existence against the winds and rains and the scorching sun.

In the struggle for existence, it is only on those who hang on for ten minutes after all is hopeless, that hope begins to dawn.

Adaptability is the simple secret of survival.

All life is a struggle.... Under competition the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind. If he do not work, neither shall he eat.

Nature, red in tooth and claw.

He didn't care about the others anymore. The chaos around him seemed to siphon away his humanity, turn him into an animal. All he wanted was to survive, make it to that building, get inside. Live. Gain another day.

Owing to this struggle for life, any variation, however slight and from whatever cause proceeding, if it be in any degree profitable to an individual of any species, in its infinitely complex relationship to other organic beings and to external nature, will tend to the preservation of that individual, and will generally be inherited by its offspring.

I believe that in a contest between the living and the almost living, the latter must, if necessary, give way to the will of the former.

The oak fought the wind and was broken, the willow bent when it must and survived.