You can’t wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.
He wastes his time over his writing, trying to accomplish what geniuses and rare men with college educations sometimes accomplish.
Don’t loaf and invite inspiration light out after it with a club.
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 sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.
Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden.
Thirty thousand a year was all right, but dyspepsia and inability to be humanly happy robbed such princely income of all its value.
Dark spruce frowned on either side of the frozen waterway.
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.
I am a sick man – oh, not my body. It is my soul, my brain. I seem to have lost all values. I care for nothing. If you had been this way a few months ago, it would have been different. It is too late, now.
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.
There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.
Too many thousands of opened books yawned between them and him. He had exiled himself.
As one grows weaker one is less susceptible to suffering. There is less hurt because there is less to hurt.
Life that did not yearn toward life was in fair way toward ceasing.
Culture and collars had gone together, to him, and he had been deceived into believing that college educations and mastery were the same things.
The bubbly play of wit, the chesty laughs, the resonant voices of men when glass in hand they shut the grey world outside and prod their brains with the fun and folly of an accelerated pulse.
Show me a man with a tattoo and I’ll show you a man with an interesting past.
I believe that when I am dead, I am dead. I believe that with my death I am just as much obliterated as the last mosquito you and I squashed.(from Who’s Who in Hell)
Yet all three animals were keyed to a tenseness of living that was almost painful, and scarcely ever would it come to them to be more alive than they were then in their seeming petrifaction.
I am first of all a white man, and only then a socialist.
It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a coward beg for life.
Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.
A man with a club [bat] is a law-maker, a man to be obeyed, but not necessarily conciliated.
Insanity? The mental processes of a man with whom one disagrees, are always wrong. Where is the line between wrong mind and sane mind? It is inconceivable that any sane man can radically disagree with one’s most sane conclusions.
…and from that moment Buck hated him with a bitter and deathless hatred.
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.
Never did he fail to respond savagely to the chatter of the squirrel he had first met on the blasted pine.
He was justifying his existence, than which life can do no greater; for life achieves its summit when it does to the uttermost that which it was equipped to do.
The proper function of man is to live-not to exist.
The proper function of man is to live not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them.
I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet.
One cannot violate the promptings of one’s nature without having that nature recoil upon itself.
Life is not a matter of holding good cards, but sometimes, playing a poor hand well.
I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.