Sleep Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is alright. This is common sense really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not well you are sleeping.

Indeed, sir, he that sleeps feels not the toothache; but a man that were to sleep your sleep, and a hangman to help him to bed, I think he would change places with his officer; for look you, sir, you know not which way you shall go.

William Shakespeare

Denial gives way to acceptance; acceptance breeds dependence. Anyone who's ever cared for a terminal patient will tell you that, too. Sick people need someone who will bring them their pills and glasses of cold sweet juice to wash them down with. They need someone to soothe their aching joints with arnica gel. They need someone to sit with them when the night is dark and the hours stretch out. They need someone to say, Sleep now, it will be better in the morning. I'm here, so sleep. Sleep now. Sleep and let me take care of everything.

Who knows if this other half of life where we think we're awake is not another sleep a little different from the first.

Methought I heard a voice cry, 'Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep,' the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

William Shakespeare

She told me she worked in the morning And started to laugh, I told her I didn't And crawled off to sleep in the bath. And when I awoke I was alone, This bird had flown. So I lit a fire, Isn't it good Norwegian wood.

Don't you know there is no one in the streets
and no one in the houses?

There are only eyes in the windows.
If you don't have a place to sleep,
knock on a door and it will open,
open up to a certain point
and you will see that it is cold inside,
and that that house is empty
and wants nothing to do with you,
your stories mean nothing,
and if you insist on being gentle,
the dog and the cat will bite you.

To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing end them: to die, to sleep No more; and by a sleep, to say we end The Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocks That Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To die to sleep, To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.

William Shakespeare

Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two. This you cannot do without temperance.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

How silent, how spacious, what room for all, yet without place to insert an atom--in graceful succession, in equal fullness, in balanced beauty, the dance of the hours goes forward still. Like an odor of incense, like a strain of music, like a sleep, it is inexact and boundless. It will not be dissected, nor unraveled, nor shown.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Why do we dream in our sleep if we have no soul? and, if we have one, how is it that dreams are so incoherent and extravagant?

When you've got some coffee that's too black, which means it's too strong. What do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you won't even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.

As a day well spent procures a happy sleep, so a life well employed procures a happy death.

Leonardo da Vinci

He that is thy friend indeed, He will help thee in thy need: If thou sorrow, he will weep; If thou wake, he cannot sleep: Thus of every grief in heart He with thee does bear a part. These are certain signs to know Faithful friend from flattering foe.

William Shakespeare

There is something in the New York air that makes sleep useless.

Simone de Beauvoir

Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time.

There is nothing frightening about an eternal dreamless sleep. Surely it is better than eternal torment in Hell and eternal boredom in Heaven.

Weariness is the shortest path to equality and fraternity-and finally liberty is bestowed by sleep.

Friedrich Nietzsche

[Sleep is]... that provisional tomb where the living exile sighs, weeps, fights and succumbs, and is born again, remembering nothing, with the day.

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.

Fanaticism must be put to sleep before it can be eradicated.

Napoleon I of France

In sleep, fantasy takes the form of dreams. But in waking life, too, we continue to dream beneath the threshold of consciousness, especially when under the influence of repressed or other unconscious complexes.

The heroic soul does not sell its justice and its nobleness. It does not ask to dine nicely and to sleep warm. The essence of greatness is the perception that virtue is enough. Poverty is its ornament. It does not need plenty, and can very well abide its loss.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

We are apt to imagine that this hubbub of Philosophy, Literature, and Religion, which is heard in pulpits, lyceums, and parlors, vibrates through the universe, and is as catholic a sound as the creaking of the earth's axle. But if a man sleeps soundly, he will forget it all between sunset and dawn.

Henry David Thoreau

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and godlike reason To fust in us unus'd.

William Shakespeare