Sleep Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The concept of dreaming is known to the waking mind but to the dreamer there is no waking, no real world, no sanity; there is only the screaming bedlam of sleep.

Wine has a drastic, an astringent taste. I cannot help wincing as I drink. Ascent of flowers, radiance and heat, are distilled here to a fiery, yellow liquid. Just behind my shoulder-blades some dry thing, wide-eyed, gently closes, gradually lulls itself to sleep. This is rapture. This is relief.

Shake off this downy sleep, death's counterfeit,
And look on death itself! up, up, and see
The great doom's image!

William Shakespeare

Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleave of care,
The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great natures second course,
Chief nourisher in life's feast.

William Shakespeare

The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It must be inconvenient to be made of flesh," said the Scarecrow thoughtfully, "for you must sleep, and eat and drink. However, you have brains, and it is worth a lot of bother to be able to think properly."

Father in Heaven! When the thought of thee wakes in our hearts let it not awaken like a frightened bird that flies about in dismay, but like a child waking from its sleep with a heavenly smile.

Søren Kierkegaard

Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace.

When the loud day for men who sow and reap
Grows still, and on the silence of the town
The insubstantial veils of night and sleep,
The meed of the day's labour, settle down,
Then for me in the stillness of the night
The wasting, watchful hours drag on their course,
And in the idle darkness comes the bite
Of all the burning serpents of remorse;
Dreams seethe; and fretful infelicities
Are swarming in my over-burdened soul,
And Memory before my wakeful eyes
With noiseless hand unwinds her lengthy scroll.
Then, as with loathing I peruse the years,
I tremble, and I curse my natal day,
Wail bitterly, and bitterly shed tears,
But cannot wash the woeful script away.

Alexander Pushkin

What drops of all the sea of our science are baled up! and by what accident it is that these are exposed, when so many secrets sleep in nature!

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Philips, whose touch harmonious could remove
The pangs of guilty power and hapless love!
Rest here, distress'd by poverty no more;
Here find that calm thou gav'st so oft before;
Sleep undisturb'd within this peaceful shrine,
Till angels wake thee with a note like thine!

Much sleep is not required by nature, either for our souls or bodies, or for the action in which they are concerned.

I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day.

If your little savage were left to himself and to his native blindness, he would in time join the infant's reasoning to the grown man's passion—he would strangle his father and sleep with his mother.

Sleep and watchfulness, both of them, when immoderate, constitute disease.

It's all God's will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

The grass so little has to do,—
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain, And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything; And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,-
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing. And even when it dies, to pass
In odors so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine. And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,—
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were a hay!

Emily Dickinson

I have an immense appetite for solitude, like an infant for sleep, and if I don't get enough for this year, I shall cry all the next.

Henry David Thoreau

For the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it.

William Shakespeare

My eyes feel all soft, all soft as flesh. I'm going to sleep.

Jean-Paul Sartre

Age is my alarm clock, the old man said. Why do old men wake so early? Is it to have one longer day?
I don't know, the boy said. All I know is that young boys sleep late and hard.

Ernest Hemingway

Is it coding — or code breaking? Is it like Deborah's job? Do be careful, Tommy, people go queer doing that and can't sleep and walk about all night groaning and repeating 978345286 or something like that and finally have nervous breakdowns and go into homes.

Agatha Christie

What, then, is that incalculable feeling that deprives the mind of the sleep necessary to life? A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.

Sleep! I feel the need of it, as never I thought any dwarf could, riding is tiring work. Yet my axe is restless in my hand. Give me a row of orc-necks and room to swing and all weariness will fall from me!

J. R. R. Tolkien

Love can do all but raise the Dead I doubt if even that From such a giant were withheld Were flesh equivalent But love is tired and must sleep, And hungry and must graze And so abets the shining Fleet Till it is out of gaze.

Emily Dickinson