quotations about sleep
Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.
HERACLITUS
Fragments
Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even.
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
Don Quixote
Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.
JOHN STEINBECK
The Grapes of Wrath
Too much sleep makes a person heavy and stupid, and those who wish to become useful to the community in their journey through life, must not take upon their backs much useless slumber.
E. L. BLANCHARD
Flights of Fancy: A Medley of Quips and Cranks in Prose and Verse
I try to be a good person at all times. I try to be nice to my co-workers and to my boss. I try, but without sleep, it's hard.
ROGER BLUHM
"Sleep is needed more than ever", Dodge City Daily Globe, August 24, 2017
Through the ghoul-guarded gateways of slumber,
Past the wan-mooned abysses of night,
I have lived o'er my lives without number,
I have sounded all things with my sight.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Nemesis"
I love sleep because it is both pleasant and safe to use. Pleasant because one is in the best possible company and safe because sleep is the consummate protection against the unseemliness that is the invariable consequence of being awake.
FRAN LEBOWITZ
Metropolitan Life
It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that yon shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is gone. A gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you; the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with a slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the wind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye--it is closed--the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.
LEIGH HUNT
The Indicator, January 12, 1820
Sleep is the gateway to those nightly visitations of the irrational.
GAYLE GREENE
Insomniac
Thus we travel from sleep to sleep, learning again to dream.
NICO SLATE
Where Nothing Needs To Be Said
People are typically astonished at how deeply they sleep when they put on a black-out mask of the sort airlines provide on long-haul flights. The equation here is simple: quiet eyes = quiet mind = a brain that quickly falls asleep.
RICHARD E. CYTOWIC
"Four Ways to More Restful Sleep", Psychology Today, August 24, 2017
To sleep is to die.
DAVID GEMMELL
Lord of the Silver Bow
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Icehenge
Sweet is the oblivion of sleep;
But sweeter far is the sleep beyond oblivion.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
Welcome is sleep, more welcome the sleep of stone
Whilst crime and shame continue in the land;
My happy fortune, not to see or hear;
Waken me not--in mercy, whisper low.
MICHELANGELO
Walks in Florence
All men, whilst they are awake, are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
HERACLITUS
attributed, The Spectator, September 18, 1755
Excessive proneness to sleep is a sign of decay and waste of brain.
ANONYMOUS
Harper's Magazine, October 1866
Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at their command; for there cometh the day to all, when neither the voice of the lute nor the bird shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
attributed, The Book of Humour, Wit & Wisdom: A Manual of Table-talk
Thou silent power, whose welcome sway
Charms every anxious thought away;
In whose divine oblivion drown'd,
Sore pain and weary toil grow mild,
Love is with kinder looks beguiled,
And Grief forgets her fondly cherish'd wound;
Oh, whither hast thou flown, indulgent god?
God of kind shadows and of healing dews,
Whom dost thou touch with thy Lethæan rod?
Around whose temples now thy opiate airs diffuse?
MARK AKENSIDE
"To Sleep"
Sleep is a natural reset button for our brain and body.
HANSA VENKATESWARAN
"Do you wake up looking tired or with dull skin? Here's what your morning face says about your health", Economic Times, August 29, 2017