Top Ten Quotes

1. It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild (I.1).
2. Growth is life, and life is forever destined to make for light (II.4).
3. He was realizing his own meaning in the world; he was doing that for which he was made-killing meat and battling to kill it. 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 (II.4).
4. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. 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 being hunted, eaten and being eaten, all in blindness and confusion, with violence and disorder, a chaos of gluttony and slaughter, ruled over by chance, merciless, painless, endless (II.5).
5. They were creatures of mastery, possessing all manner of unknown and impossible potencies, overlords of the alive and the not alive. They were fire-makers! They were gods! (III.1).
6. 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 those deeps; but Gray Beaver did not caress nor speak kind words (III.5).
7. His heredity was a life-stuff that may be likened to clay. It possessed many possibilities, was capable of being molded into many different forms. Environment served to model the clay, to give it a particular form (III.6).
8. Much of the Wild had been lost, so that to [other dogs] the Wild was the unknown, the terrible, the ever menacing and ever warring. But to him, in appearance and action and impulse, still clung the Wild. He symbolized it, was its personification; so that when they showed their teeth to him they were defending themselves against the powers of destruction that lurked in the shadows of the forest and in the dark beyond the camp-fire (IV.1).
9. They were [White Fang's] environment, these men, and they were molding the clay of him into a more ferocious thing than had been intended by Nature (IV.3).

10. The basic life that was in him took charge of him. The will to exist of his body surged over him. He was dominated by this mere flesh-love of life. All intelligence was gone. It was as though he had no brain. His reason was unseated by the blind yearning of his flesh to exist and move, at all hazards to move, to continue to move, for movement was the expression of its existence (IV.4.).