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.
In the height of the gusts, in my high position, where the seas did not break, I found myself compelled to cling tightly to the rail to escape being blown away. My face was stung to severe pain by the high-driving spindrift, and I had a feeling that the wind was blowing the cobwebs out of my sleep-starved brain.
Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class feelings of superiority.
Buck found it to be cheaper to mend his ways than to retaliate.
Between us and the bottom of the sea was less than an inch of wood. And yet, I aver it, and I aver it again, I was unafraid.
Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.
He had a way of taking Buck’s head roughly between his hands, and resting his own head upon Buck’s, of shaking him back and forth, the while calling him ill names that to Buck were love names. Buck knew no greater joy than that rough embrace and the sound of murmured oaths, and at each jerk back and forth it seemed that his heart would be shaken out of his body so great was its ecstasy.
Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job. That was their first word and their last. It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas. Get a job! Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked. Small wonder the world belonged to the strong. The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery. A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped.
The trouble with him was that he was without imagination.