Who are you, Martin Eden? he demanded of himself in the looking- glass, that night when he got back to his room. He gazed at himself long and curiously. Who are you? What are you? Where do you belong?...
There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.
There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetful...
Their hate bound them together as love could never bind.
He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong...
Had the cub thought in man-fashion, he might have epitomized life as a voracious appetite, and the world as a place wherein ranged a multitude of appetites, pursuing and being pursued, hunting and bei...
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,...
It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a coward beg for life.
I have indeed lived life in a very rough school and have seen more than the average man's share of inhumanity and cruelty, from the forecastle and the prison, the slum and the desert, the execution-ch...
Growth is life, and life is for ever destined to make for light.
Beauty is the only master to serve.
A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laugh...
It was an old song, old as the breed itself - one of the first songs of the younger world in a day when songs were sad.
He had come to know quite thoroughly the world in which he lived. His outlook was bleak and materialistic. The world as he saw it was a fierce and brutal world, a world without warmth, a world in whic...
Also, as I looked at the mite of a youth with the heart of a lion, I thought, this is the type that on occasion rears barricades and shows the world that men have not forgotten how to die.
With the last remnant of his strength
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? That’s the question. I’ve been aski...
When he was made, the mould was broke, said Pete.
Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN.
Intelligent men are cruel. Stupid men are monstrously cruel.