The pitch to which he was aroused was tremendous. All the fighting blood of his breed was up in him and surging through him. This was living., though he did not know it. He was realizing his own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made... 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.
What did you have in you? – some childish notions, a few half-baked sentiments, a lot of undigested beauty, a great black mass of ignorance, a heart filled to bursting with love, and an ambition as big as your love and as futile as your ignorance.
White Fang was glad to acknowledge his lordship, but it was lordship based upon superior intelligence and brute strength... There were deeps in his nature which had never been sounded. A kind word, a caressing touch of the hand, on the part of Gray Beaver, might have sounded these deeps; but Gray Beaver did not caress nor speak kind words. It was not his way.
But I am I, and I won’t subordinate my taste to the unanimous judgment of mankind. If I don’t like a thing, I don’t like it, that’s all; and there is no reason under the sun why I should ape a liking for it just because the majority of my fellow-creatures like it, or make believe they like it. I can’t follow the fashions in the things I like or dislike.
John Thornton stood over Buck, struggling to control himself, too convulsed with rage to speak. “If you strike that dog again, I’ll kill you,” he at last managed to say in a choking voice.
They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization.
You are metaphysicians. You can prove anything by metaphysics; and having done so, every metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician wrong – to his own satisfaction. You are anarchists in the realm of thought. And you are mad cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of his own making, created out of his own fancies and desires. You do not know the real world in which you live, and your thinking has no place in the real world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental aberration.
There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.
Life streamed through him in splendid flood, glad and rampant, until it seemed that it would burst him asunder in sheer ecstasy and pour forth generously over the world.
Bitter rage was his, but never blind rage. In passion to rend and destroy, he never forgot that his enemy was in like passion to rend and destroy.
Beauty is the only master to serve.
No man can be intellectually insulted. Insult, in its very nature, is emotional.
He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn.
I was not made for the desk and counting-house, for petty business squabbling, and legal jangling.
Drink,” says the White Logic. “The Greeks believed that the gods gave them wine so that they might forget the miserableness of existence.
Love, genuine passionate love, was his for the first time. This he had never experienced at Judge Miller’s down in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. With the Judge’s sons, hunting and tramping, it had been a working partnership; with the Judge’s grandsons, a sort of pompous guardianship; and with the Judge himself, a stately and dignified friendship. But love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness, it had taken John Thornton to arouse.
Why didn’t you dare it before?” he asked harshly. “When I hadn’t a job? When I was starving? When I was just as I am now, as a man, as an artist, the same Martin Eden?
He was older than the days he had seen and the breaths he had drawn. He linked the past with the present, and the eternity behind him throbbed through him in a mighty rhythm to which he swayed as the tides and seasons swayed.
Of course it was beautiful; but there was something more than beauty in it, something more stingingly splendid which had made beauty its handmaiden.
Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.