Sleep Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

Cold be hand and heart and bone, and cold be sleep under stone: never more to wake on stony bed, never, till the Sun fails and the Moon is dead. In the black wind the stars shall die, and still on gold here let them lie, till the dark lord lifts his hand over dead sea and withered land.

J. R. R. Tolkien

As to sleep, you know, I never sleep now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don't get any pay, and he's got nothing on his mind.

Charles Dickens

A song is no song unless the circumstance is free and fine. If a singer sing from a sense of duty or from seeing no way to escape,I had rather have none. Those only can sleep who do not care to sleep; and those only write or speak best who do not too much respect the writing or the speaking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, and in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king?

William Shakespeare

One must have all the virtues to sleep well. Shall I bear false witness? Shall I commit adultery? Shall I covet my neighbor's maid? All that would go ill with good sleep.

Friedrich Nietzsche

Full in the midst of this infernal road,
An Elm displays her dusky arms abroad;
The God of Sleep there hides his heavy head
And empty dreams on every leaf are spread.

A lethargy of sleep,
Most like to death, so calm, so deep.

If you act, you show character; if you sit still, you show it; if you sleep you show it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Reflecting on these complex relationships between reader and story, fiction and life, can constitute a form of therapy against the sleep of reason, which generates monsters.

Alas, why are my nights all thus lost? Ah, why do I ever miss his sight whose breath touches my sleep?

Rabindranath Tagore

These hints, dropped as it were from sleep and night, let us use in broad day. The student is to read history actively and not passively; to esteem his own life the text, and books the commentary. Thus compelled, the Muse of history will utter oracles, as never to those who do not respect themselves. I have no expectation that any man will read history aright, who thinks that what was done in a remote age, by men whose names have resounded far, has any deeper sense than what he is doing today.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Everything I do, I say to myself, 'Will God accept this?' Sleep is a rehearsal for death. One day you wake up and it's Judgment Day. So you do good deeds. I love going to hospitals. I love sick people. I don't worry about disease. Allah will protect me. He always does.

So it comes to this; one doesn't need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn't sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn't it? Wait a minute, there's a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it's life without a break.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Sleep teaching was actually prohibited in England. There was something called liberalism. Parliament, if you know what that was, passed a law against it. The records survive. Speeches about liberty of the subject. Liberty to be inefficient and miserable. Freedom to be a round peg in a square hole.

And then to sleep with a prayer for the beloved in your heart and a song of praise upon your lips.

She looks like sleep,
As she would catch a second Antony
In her strong toil of grace.

William Shakespeare

Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when
The bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix,
Her ashes new-create another heir
As great in admiration as herself.

William Shakespeare

There are two gates of Sleep, one of which it is held is made of horn and by it easy egress is given to real ghosts; the other shining, fashioned of gleaming white ivory, but the shades send deceptive visions that way to the light.

In all of us, even in good men, there is a lawless wild-beast nature, which peers out in sleep.

To rise at six, to dine at ten,
To sup at six, to sleep at ten,
Makes a man live for ten times ten.

From all that terror teaches,
From lies of tongue and pen,
From all the easy speeches
That comfort cruel men,
From sale and profanation
Of honour and the sword,
From sleep and from damnation,
Deliver us, good Lord!

G. K. Chesterton

A Path to Equality. - A few hours of mountain climbing turn a rascal and a saint into two pretty similar creatures. Fatigue is the shortest way to Equality and Fraternity—and, in the end, Liberty will surrender to Sleep.

Friedrich Nietzsche

The little King dragged himself to the bed and lay down upon it, almost exhausted with hunger and fatigue... He murmured drowsily—
"Prithee call me when the table is spread," and sank into a deep sleep immediately.
A smile twinkled in Hendon's eye, and he said to himself—
"By the mass, the little beggar takes to one's quarters and usurps one's bed with as natural and easy a grace as if he owned them..."

I look upon death to be as necessary to our constitution as sleep. We shall rise refreshed in the morning.

Benjamin Franklin

Where the shadow of the bridge fell I could see down for a long way, but not as far as the bottom. When you leave a leaf in water a long time after awhile the tissue will be gone and the delicate fibres waving slow as the motion of sleep. They don't touch one another, no matter how knotted up they once were, no matter how close they lay once to the bones.

William Faulkner