...in his gambling, he had one besetting weakness -- faith in a system; and this made his damnation certain.
Jack LondonThe trouble with him was that he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things, and not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man's frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man's place in the universe.
Jack LondonA man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.
Jack LondonThere is such a thing as anaesthesia of pain, engendered by pain too exquisite to be borne.
Jack LondonThe 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.
Jack London