Quotes about sleep
page 2

“How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank
Here we will sit, and let the sounds of music
Creep in our ears; soft stillness, and the night
Become the touches of sweet harmony”

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) English playwright and poet

Music, Night

“By night, Love, tie your heart to mine, and the two
together in their sleep will defeat the darkness”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: 100 Love Sonnets

Love, Heart, Night

“The only thing that comes to a sleeping man is dreams.”

Tupac Shakur (1971–1996) rapper and actor

Dreams

“Now I am an outcast. I loathe my country. The best thing for me is a drunken sleep on the beach.”

Arthur Rimbaud (1854–1891) French Decadent and Symbolist poet

Source: Une saison en enfer; Illuminations; et autres textes

Country

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

Frank Herbert book Dune

Variant: Without new experiences, something inside of us sleeps. The sleeper must awaken.
Source: Dune

Change

“I wonder if the snowthe trees and fields, that it kisses them so gently? And then it covers them up snug, you know, with a white quilt; and perhaps it says, "Go to sleep, darlings, till the summer comes again.”

Lewis Carroll (1832–1898) English writer, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer

Source: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

Kiss, Tree, Summer

“O heavenly Father,
protect and bless all things
that have breath: guard them
from all evil and let them sleep in peace.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

Memoirs of Childhood and Youth (1924)
Context: One thing that specially saddened me was that the unfortunate animals had to suffer so much pain and misery. The sight of an old limping horse, tugged forward by one man while another kept beating it with a stick to get it to the knacker's yard at Colmar, haunted me for weeks. It was quite incomprehensible to me — this was before I began going to school — why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. It was quite incomprehensible to me — this was before I began going to school — why in my evening prayers I should pray for human beings only. So when my mother had prayed with me and had kissed me good-night, I used to add silently a prayer that I had composed myself for all living creatures. It ran thus: "O, heavenly Father, protect and bless all things that have breath; guard them from all evil, and let them sleep in peace."

Peace, Evil

“Are you sure/That we are awake? It seems to me/That yet we sleep, we dream”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Dreams

“I love to sleep. Do you? Isn't it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.”

Rita Rudner (1953) American comedian

Love, World

“Evil in general does not sleep, and therefore doesn't see why anyone else should.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

Source: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Evil

“I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can't give to you, crushes the breath from my chest. Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.”

Gregory David Roberts book Shantaram

Source: Shantaram

Love, Star, Laughter, Heart

“Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Love, Sadness

“Love's stories written in love's richest books.
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.”

William Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream

Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream

Love, Books

“The bravest person I know is afraid of the dark. She sleeps with a night lamp always, but if her friends are threatened? She suddenly thinks she's a bear twelve feet tall and attacks whoever scared her friends.”

Tamora Pierce book Cold Fire

Source: Cold Fire

Thinking, Personality, Night

“But when a woman decides to sleep with a man, there is no wall she will not scale, no fortress she will not destroy, no moral consideration she will not ignore at its very root: there is no God worth worrying about.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Love in the Time of Cholera

Source: Love in the Time of Cholera

God

“If your children ever find out how lame you really are, they’ll murder you in your sleep.”

Frank Zappa (1940–1993) American musician, songwriter, composer, and record and film producer

To tourists at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, Los Angeles CA, December 1965
Liner notes for the album Freak Out! (27 June 1966).

Children

“If you are with the quality, or at a funeral, or trying to go to sleep when you ain't sleepy - if you are anywheres where it won't do for you to scratch, why you will itch all over in upwards of a thousand places.”

Mark Twain book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Source: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

“It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'-and-rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see fine tonight in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.”

Dylan Thomas book Under Milk Wood

Source: " Under Milk Wood http://www.undermilkwood.net/prose_umw1.html" (1954)

People, Spring, Cats, Housing

“Fatigue is the safest sleeping draught.”

Virginia Woolf book Jacob's Room

Source: Jacob's Room

“If you’re twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them – wherever you go.”

Anthony Bourdain book Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

Medium Raw (2010)
Source: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook

People, Travel, Learning, Cooking

“I'm doped and thick from my last sleeping pill.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Source: Ariel: The Restored Edition

“They have worries, they're counting the miles, they're thinking about where to sleep tonight, how much money for gas, the weather, how they'll get there - and all the time they'll get there anyway, you see.”

Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) American writer

Source: On the Road: the Original Scroll

Money, Thinking, Time, Weather

“Have courage for the great sorrows of life and patience for the small ones; and when you have laboriously accomplished your daily task, go to sleep in peace. God is awake.”

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) French poet, novelist, and dramatist

Courageous, Life, God, Peace

“You can be betrayed in your sleep. The whole world can tilt while you're dreaming of butterflies.”

Alice Hoffman book The Ice Queen

Source: The Ice Queen

World, Dreams

“Read day and night, devour books — these sleeping pills — not to know but to forget! Through books you can retrace your way back to the origins of spleen, discarding history and its illusions.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: Tears and Saints (1937)

Books, Way, History, Reading

“Sir, in my heart there was a kind of fighting
That would not let me sleep.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Heart, Fight

“Men who are unhappy, like men who sleep badly, are always proud of the fact.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1930s, The Conquest of Happiness (1930)

Men

“A well-spent day brings happy sleep”

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

Happiness

“Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. It is a mental torture I find debasing… I simply cannot get used to the nightly betrayal of reason, humanity, genius.”

Vladimir Nabokov book Speak, Memory

Source: Speak, Memory

World, Betrayal

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

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

Source: Gitanjali: Song Offerings

Night

“So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger.”

Patti Smith Just Kids

Source: Just Kids

Youth, Smile, Light

“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 god-like reason to fust in us unused.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

God, Time

“I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night.”

Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) American poet, novelist and short story writer

Travel, Night

“I never dreamed the sea so deep,
The earth so dark; so long my sleep,
I have become another child.
I wake to see the world go wild.”

Allen Ginsberg (1926–1997) American poet

World, Dreams, Sea

“When I said I wanted to die in my sleep, I meant I wanted to be stepped on by an elephant while making love.”

Roger Zelazny (1937–1995) American speculative fiction writer

Source: The Great Book of Amber

Love, Making love

“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?”

Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American author and journalist

No source in Hemingway's works has been found. May have originated in a 2000 post to the Usenet group alt.support.depression. link https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/alt.support.depression/wYH4aCNHyp4/_d50yuXTeHsJ Disputed

Love, Life

“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 doth bear a part.
These are certain signs to know
Faithful friend from flattering foe.”

William Shakespeare book The Passionate Pilgrim

Source: The Passionate Pilgrim

Faith, Help, Heart, Parting

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

Leonardo Da Vinci (1452–1519) Italian Renaissance polymath

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (1883), XIX Philosophical Maxims. Morals. Polemics and Speculations.

Life, Death, Happiness

“Rose, oh pure contradiction, desire,
To be no one's sleep under so many
Lids.”

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) Austrian poet and writer

Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.
Rilke wrote his own epitaph sometime before October 27, 1925. He requested that it be inscribed on his gravestone. This was fifteen months before his death. (Translation: John J.L.Mood)
Source: The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

“You didn't kill him. He would have killed you, but you didn't kill him."
"So? He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.”

Tamora Pierce In the Hand of the Goddess

Source: In the Hand of the Goddess

Stupidity, Time

“He closed his eyes and sank into the warm dusk that separates consciosness and sleep, where reality bends and sways to the wind of thought, and where creativity blossoms in its freedom from boundaries and all things are possible.”

Christopher Paolini (1983) American author

Reality, Freedom

“leave me in peace, let me sleep one night at least without my pillow being wet with tears, my eyes burning and my head throbbing”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Peace, Tear, Night

“I cannot sleep for dreaming; I cannot dream but I wake and walk about the house as though I'd find you comin' through the door.”

Arthur Miller The Crucible

Source: The Crucible

Dreams, Housing

“A knavish speech sleeps in a fool's ear.”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Fools

“Please don’t spoil my day; I’m miles away and, after all, I’m only sleeping.”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

Source: Lyrics of John Lennon

“Never sleep with someone whose troubles are worse than your own.”

Nelson Algren book A Walk on the Wild Side

Source: A Walk on the Wild Side

“The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?”

W.B. Yeats The Second Coming

The Second Coming (1919)
Context: p>Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?</p

“There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord: she is never sad but when she sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say, she hath often dreamt of unhappiness, and waked herself with laughing.”

William Shakespeare book Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Sadness, Daughters

“Is death the last sleep? No, it is the last and final awakening.”

Walter Scott (1771–1832) Scottish historical novelist, playwright, and poet

Death

“Fairy Song
Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Weep no more! oh, weep no more!
Young buds sleep in the root’s white core.
Dry your eyes! oh, dry your eyes!
For I was taught in Paradise
To ease my breast of melodies,—
Shed no tear.

Overhead! look overhead!
‘Mong the blossoms white and red—
Look up, look up! I flutter now
On this fresh pomegranate bough.
See me! ’tis this silvery bill
Ever cures the good man’s ill.
Shed no tear! oh, shed no tear!
The flower will bloom another year.
Adieu, adieu—I fly—adieu!
I vanish in the heaven’s blue,—
Adieu, adieu!”

John Keats (1795–1821) English Romantic poet

Flowers, Tear, Flying

“Please don't wake me, no, don't shake me, leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping…”

John Lennon (1940–1980) English singer and songwriter

“Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep, perchance to dream—For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause, there's the respect, That makes calamity of so long life”

William Shakespeare Hamlet

Source: Hamlet

Life, Death, Dreams

“I want to tell you, don't marry suffering. Some people do. They get married to it, and sleep and eat together, just as husband and wife. If they go with joy they think it's adultery.”

Saul Bellow book Seize the Day

Source: Seize the Day

People, Thinking, Suffering, Joy

“There are two kinds of people, those who like to sleep next to the wall, and those who like to sleep next to the people who push them off the bed.”

Etgar Keret (1967) Israeli and polish writer and screenwriter

Source: The Bus Driver Who Wanted to be God & Other Stories

People

“Talking to people makes me feel like sleeping. Only my ghostly and imaginary friends, only the conversations I have in my dreams, are genuinely real and substantial.”

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher

People, Dreams, Feeling

“One should say before sleeping: I have lived many lives. I have been a slave and a prince. Many a beloved has sat upon my knee and I have sat upon the knees of many a beloved. Everything that has been shall be again.”

W.B. Yeats (1865–1939) Irish poet and playwright

“I have slept with you all night long while the dark earth spins with the living and the dead, and on waking suddenly in the midst of the shadow my arm encircled your waist. Neither night nor sleep could separate us.”

Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) Chilean poet

Source: Love Poems

Night, Dead

“I wanted to crawl in between those black lines of print, the way you crawl through a fence, and go to sleep under that beautiful big green fig-tree.”

Sylvia Plath book The Bell Jar

Source: The Bell Jar

Beauty, Way, Tree

“The sigh of all the seas breaking in measure round the isles soothed them; the night wrapped them; nothing broke their sleep, until, the birds beginning and the dawn weaving their thin voices in to its whiteness”

Virginia Woolf book To the Lighthouse

Source: To the Lighthouse

Bird, Sea, Night

“See, the night doth enfold us! See, all the world lies sleeping!”

Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924) Italian composer

World, Night

“God thinks in the geniuses, dreams in the poets, and sleeps in the other people.”

Peter Altenberg (1859–1919) Austrian writer and poet

Gott denkt in den Genies, träumt in den Dichtern und schläft in den übrigen Menschen.
Der Nachlass von Peter Altenberg, p. 20

God, People, Dreams, Thinking

“Not as in rest she bowed,
But large hot tears were coursing down her cheek.
And her low-panted sobs broke awefully
Upon the sleeping echoes of the night.”

Lewis Carroll Three Sunsets and Other Poems

The Path of Roses (1856)
Three Sunsets and Other Poems (1898)

Tear, Night

“Now days are dragon-ridden, the nightmare
Rides upon sleep: a drunken soldiery
Can leave the mother, murdered at her door,
To crawl in her own blood, and go scot-free.”

W.B. Yeats book The Tower

I, st. 4 The Tower (1928), Nineteen Hundred And Nineteen http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1547/

“The smile that flickers on baby's lips when he sleeps — does anybody know where it was born? Yes, there is a rumor that a young pale beam of a crescent moon touched the edge of a vanishing autumn cloud, and there the smile was first born in the dream of a dew-washed morning.”

Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) Bengali polymath

61 Gitanjali http://www.spiritualbee.com/gitanjali-poems-of-tagore/ (1912)

Smile, Dreams, Autumn, Baby

“I can’t sleep. There’s always somebody not getting treatment. I can’t stand that.”

Paul Farmer (1959) American anthropologist

quoted on page 24.
Mountains Beyond Mountains

“I believe in sleeping.”

Bruce Lee (1940–1973) Hong Kong-American actor, martial artist, philosopher and filmmaker

When asked by his brother Robert if he believed in God, p. 129
The Warrior Within : The Philosophies of Bruce Lee (1996)

“After experiencing profound emotions, one sleeps profoundly.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

“Last night I saw you in my dreams/Now I can't wait to go to sleep/And this life is all a dream/So my real life starts when I go to sleep.”

Kanye West (1977) American rapper, singer and songwriter

"Hey Mama", Live Grammy Performance, February 2008
Lyrics, 808s & Heartbreak (2008)

Life, Dreams, Waiting, Night

“The next tide will erase the way through the mudflats,
and everything will be again equal on all sides;
but the small, far-out island already has its
eyes closed; bewildered, the dike draws a circlearound its inhabitants who were born
into a sleep in which many worlds
are silently confused, for they rarely speak,
and every phrase is like an epitaph.”

Rainer Maria Rilke book New Poems

Die nächste Flut verwischt den Weg im Watt,
und alles wird auf allen Seiten gleich;
die kleine Insel draußen aber hat
die Augen zu; verwirrend kreist der Deichum ihre Wohner, die in einem Schlaf
geboren werden, drin sie viele Welten
verwechseln schweigend, denn sie reden selten,
und jeder Satz ist wie ein Epitaph
Die Insel I (The Island I) (as translated by Cliff Crego)
Neue Gedichte (New Poems) (1907)

World, Way, Drawing

“Such an environment of love and affection (at school) had not as yet allowed my life to be exposed to hardships. Depending on others was my habit. You will be surprised to know that prior to my journey to the college I had never bought a train-ticket myself…the very first day I realized that moving out of the controlled school life and stepping into the free college life is no less than inviting all sorts of hassles to yourself. Nobody tells you how to read. Nobody tells you what to do, where to go, when to sleep, and when to wake up. The one who is used to restrictions gets perturbed by this freedom.”

Zakir Hussain (politician) (1897–1969) 3rd President of India

Source: Quest for Truth (1999), pp.32-33.

Love, Life, School, Freedom

“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 book Human, All Too Human

II.263
Human, All Too Human (1878)

Way, Mountain

“Those truly natural wants, which reason alone, without some other help, is not able to fence against, nor keep from disturbing us. The pains of sickness and hurts, hunger, thirst, and cold, want of sleep and rest or relaxation of the part weary'd with labour, are what all men feel and the best dispos'd minds cannot but be sensible of their uneasiness; and therefore ought, by fit applications, to seek their removal, though not with impatience, or over great haste, upon the first approaches of them, where delay does not threaten some irreparable harm. The pains that come from the necessities of nature, are monitors to us to beware of greater mischiefs, which they are the forerunner of; and therefore they must not be wholly neglected, and strain'd too far. But yet the more children can be inur'd to hardships of this kind, by a wise care to make them stronger in body and mind, the better it will be for them.”

John Locke book Some Thoughts Concerning Education

Sec. 107
Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)

Men, Hunger, Pain, Children

“Man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

1950s, What Desires Are Politically Important? (1950)

Animals, Parting

“If we could sleep twenty-four hours a day, we would soon return to the primordial slime, the beatitude of that perfect torpor before Genesis-the dream of every consciousness sick of itself.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

Dreams, Perfection

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

Hippocrates (-460–-370 BC) ancient Greek physician

7:72.
Aphorisms

Disease

“I hope I won't end up having to hunt you all down and kill you in your sleep.”

Linus Torvalds (1969) Finnish-American software engineer and hacker

Linus Torvalds - Google+, Torvalds, Linus, 2013-04-05, 2013-04-05 https://plus.google.com/102150693225130002912/posts/hvnMn1fFKEm, 2010s, 2013

Hope

“In infancy I was afraid of the dark, which I peopled with all sorts of things; but my grandfather cured me of that by daring me to walk through certain dark parts of the house when I was 3 or 4 years old. After that, dark places held a certain fascination for me. But it is in dreams that I have known the real clutch of stark, hideous, maddening, paralysing fear. My infant nightmares were classics, & in them there is not an abyss of agonising cosmic horror that I have not explored. I don't have such dreams now—but the memory of them will never leave me. It is undoubtedly from them that the darkest & most gruesome side of my fictional imagination is derived. At the ages of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, & 8 I have been whirled through formless abysses of infinite night and adumbrated horrors as black & as seethingly sinister as any of our friend Fafhrd's [a nickname Lovecraft used for Fritz Leiber] "splatter-stencil" triumphs. That's why I appreciate such triumphs so keenly, I have seen these things! Many a time I have awaked in shrieks of panic, & have fought desperately to keep from sinking back into sleep & its unutterable horrors. At the age of six my dreams became peopled with a race of lean, faceless, rubbery, winged things to which I applied the home-made name of night-gaunts. Night after night they would appear in exactly the same form—& the terror they brought was beyond any verbal description. Long decades later I embodied them in one of my Fungi from Yuggoth pseudo-sonnets, which you may have read. Well—after I was 8 all these things abated, perhaps because of the scientific habit of mind which I was acquiring (or trying to acquire). I ceased to believe in religion or any other form of the supernatural, & the new logic gradually reached my subconscious imagination. Still, occasional nightmares brought recurrent touches of the ancient fear—& as late as 1919 I had some that I could use in fiction without much change. The Statement of Randolph Carter is a literal dream transcript. Now, in the sere & yellow leaf (I shall be 47 in August), I seem to be rather deserted by stark horror. I have nightmares only 2 or 3 times a year, & of these none even approaches those of my youth in soul-shattering, phobic monstrousness. It is fully a decade & more since I have known fear in its most stupefying & hideous form. And yet, so strong is the impress of the past, I shall never cease to be fascinated by fear as a subject for aesthetic treatment. Along with the element of cosmic mystery & outsideness, it will always interest me more than anything else. It is, in a way, amusing that one of my chief interests should be an emotion whose poignant extremes I have never known in waking life!”

H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) American author

Letter to Harry O. Fischer (late February 1937), in Selected Letters V, 1934-1937 edited by August Derleth and Donald Wandrei, pp. 416-417
Non-Fiction, Letters

Life, People, Youth, Age

“Knowing how they were sleeping on a dirt floor at that very moment, while I had a soft pillow under my head, made me feel incredibly guilty.”

AnnaSophia Robb (1993) American actress, singer, and model

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (2008)

Feeling

“Rest in my arms
Sleep in my bed
There's a design
To what I did and said”

Sufjan Stevens (1975) American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist

"Vito's Ordination Song"
Lyrics, Michigan (2003)

“When the last days were upon me, and the ugly trifles of existence began to drive me to madness like the small drops of water torturers let fall ceaselessly upon one spot of their victim's body, I loved the irradiate refuge of sleep. In my dreams I found a little of the beauty I had vainly sought in life, and wandered through old gardens and enchanted woods.”

H.P. Lovecraft book Ex Oblivione

"Ex Oblivione" - First published in The United Amateur, 20, No. 4 (March 1921)
Fiction

Love, Life, Beauty, Dreams

“If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relaxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.”

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) German literary critic, philosopher and social critic (1892-1940)

Source: "The Storyteller" (1936), p. 91

Dreams, Bird

“Under each arm he carries an umbrella; one of them, with pictures on the inside, he spreads over the good children, and then they dream the most beautiful stories the whole night. But the other umbrella has no pictures, and this he holds over the naughty children so that they sleep heavily, and wake in the morning without having dreamed at all.”

Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) Danish author, fairy tale writer, and poet

Ole-Lukøie
Fairy Tales (1835)

Children, Beauty, Dreams, Night

“He that hath once got the fame of an early riser, may sleep till noon.”

James Howell (1594–1666) Anglo-Welsh historian and writer

Source: [Howell, James, Epistolae Ho-Elianae, https://books.google.com/books?id=v79CAAAAcAAJ&q=%22till%20noon%22, Google Books, 1655 Edition, 20 September 2016]

“Young love is errant, but it needs to get around;
The time and practice make it strong and sound.
That bull you fear, you petted when it wasn't big;
What now you sleep beneath was once a twig.
That little stream, in gaining waters as it goes,
Grows stronger, till at last a river flows.”
Dum novus errat amor, vires sibi colligat usu: Si bene nutrieris, tempore firmus erit. Quem taurum metuis, vitulum mulcere solebas: Sub qua nunc recubas arbore, virga fuit: Nascitur exiguus, sed opes adquirit eundo, Quaque venit, multas accipit amnis aquas.

Ovid book Ars amatoria

Book II, lines 339–344 (tr. Len Krisak)
Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love)

Love, Fear, Strong, Water

“"Teddy — I suppose Mummy and Daddy are real, aren't they?"
Teddy said, "You ask such silly questions, David. Nobody knows what 'real' really means. Let's go indoors."
"First I'm going to have another rose!" Plucking a bright pink flower, he carried it with him into the house. It could lie on the pillow as he went to sleep. Its beauty and softness reminded him of Mummy.”

Brian W. Aldiss book Super-Toys Last All Summer Long

Super-Toys Last All Summer Long (1969)

Lie, Beauty, Flowers, Question

“I think basically the youth of today are just having so many problems and they are sort of confused…This is their method, of escaping…Just like I sleep to escape my problems.”

Yolanda King (1955–2007) American actress

1970s

Youth, Problem, Thinking

“What were all the world’s alarms
To mighty Paris when he found
Sleep upon a golden bed
That first dawn in Helen’s arms?”

W.B. Yeats book The Winding Stair and Other Poems

Lullaby http://poetry.poetryx.com/poems/1527/, st. 1 The Winding Stair and Other Poems (1933)

World

“where the Gauls stealthily, at the time of night when sleep falls on men, attacked the high citadel and of a sudden stained with blood walls and watchers.”
Qua Galli furtim noctu summa arcis adorti moenia concubia vigilesque repente cruentant.

Ennius (-239–-169 BC) Roman writer

As quoted by Macrobius in Saturnalia, Book I, Chapter IV (tr. J. Elliott)

Men, Time, Night

“Come sleep, O sleep, the certain knot of peace,
The baiting place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low.”

Philip Sidney book Astrophel and Stella

Sonnet 39, line 1.
Astrophel and Stella (1591)

Peace, Indifference, Wealth

“Night, having Sleep, the brother of Death.”

Hesiod Greek poet

Source: The Theogony (c. 700 BC), line 754.

Death, Night

“O thou that rollest above, round as the shield of my fathers! Whence are thy beams, O sun! thy everlasting light? Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty; the stars hide themselves in the sky; the moon, cold and pale, sinks in the western wave; but thou thyself movest alone. Who can be a companion of thy course? The oaks of the mountains fall; the mountains themselves decay with years; the ocean shrinks and grows again; the moon herself is lost in heaven: but thou art for ever the same, rejoicing in the brightness of thy course. When the world is dark with tempests, when thunder rolls and lightning flies, thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds, and laughest at the storm. But to Ossian thou lookest in vain, for he beholds thy beams no more: whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds, or thou tremblest at the gates of the west. But thou art, perhaps, like me, for a season; thy years will have an end. Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds, careless of the voice of the morning. Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth!”

James Macpherson (1736–1796) Scottish writer, poet, translator, and politician

"Carthon", pp. 163–164
The Poems of Ossian

Youth, World, Beauty, Art

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

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

“I wanted to see how I would react. I didn’t think I would actually get through my fear as fast as I did. But was I scared of meeting Robert in makeup? No… well, yes, I’m lying. I don’t want to admit it because I’m 22 years old, and that’s ridiculous. But I was scared for about a year after I saw one of Freddy’s films when I was 7. I wasn’t supposed to be up, but I snuck behind my brother’s chair. And right as I got to the chair, Freddy’s face popped up. I had to go sleep with my mom. And when I say sleep with her, I was probably on top of her.”

Kelly Rowland (1981) singer, songwriter, actress

It's Kelly Rowland vs. Freddy and Jason! http://ew.com/article/2003/08/14/its-kelly-rowland-vs-freddy-and-jason/ (August 14, 2003)

Fear, Lying, Moms, Thinking

“I encourage you to welcome refugees into your homes and communities, so that their first experience of Europe is not the traumatic experience of sleeping cold on the streets, but one of warm welcome.”

Pope Francis (1936) 266th Pope of the Catholic Church

"Pope: welcoming refugees helps keeps us safe from terrorism", Lexington Herald-Leader (17 September 2016) http://www.kentucky.com/news/nation-world/world/article102453732.html 2010s, 2016

Home, Communication

“It is only in sleep that true imagination ever stirs within us. Awake, we never imagine anything; we merely alter, vary, or transpose. We give another twist to the kaleidoscope of the things we see around us, and obtain another pattern; but not one of us has ever added one tiniest piece of new glass to the toy.”

Jerome K. Jerome (1859–1927) English humorist

Dreams http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext97/jjdrm10.txt

Imagination

“Our decisions are to a much greater extent dependent on our desire to conform to the standards of our class and environment than we are inclined to admit. A considerable proportion of our reasoning is merely an automatic function, so to speak, of influences and impressions which have become part of us, and anyone who has been brought up from childhood in the stern school of military discipline is particularly apt to succumb to the hypnotic and compulsive force exercised by an order of word of command; a force which is logically entirely incomprehensible and which irresistibly undermines his will. In the straitjacket of a uniform, even though fully aware of their absurdity, an officer will carry out his instructions lie a sleep-walker, unresistingly and almost unconsciously.”

Stefan Zweig book Beware of Pity

Beware of Pity (1939)

Lie, School, Exercises, Decision

“These flowers, which were splendid and sprightly,
Waking in the dawn of the morning,
In the evening will be a pitiful frivolity,
Sleeping in the cold night’s arms.”

Pedro Calderón de la Barca (1600–1681) Spanish dramatist

Éstas que fueron pompa y alegría despertando al albor de la mañana, a la tarde serán lástima vana durmiendo en brazos de la noche fría. A las flores ("Éstas, que fueron pompa y alegría") http://es.wikisource.org/wiki/A_las_flores_%28Calder%C3%B3n_de_la_Barca%29.

Flowers, Night

“Without that forward-going, courageous consciousness, a woman herself will drift into unconsciousness and terror. It's the sleep of the naive and damned. She needs to wake herself up and bring her own masculine consciousness into the forefront so she can survive in the world. Unless woman is taken out of man, then she isn't a human being – she's just a creature.”

Jordan Peterson (1962) Canadian clinical psychologist, cultural critic, and professor of psychology

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifi5KkXig3s "Biblical Series IV: Adam and Eve: Self-Consciousness, Evil, and Death"

World, Courage

“One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable.”

Eleanor Roosevelt My Day

11 September 1941
My Day (1935–1962)

“As geological time goes, it is but a moment since the human race began and only the twinkling of an eye since the arts of civilization were first invented. In spite of some alarmists, it is hardly likely that our species will completely exterminate itself. And so long as man continues to exist, we may be pretty sure that, whatever he may suffer for a time, and whatever brightness may be eclipsed, he will emerge sooner or later, perhaps strengthened and reinvigorated by a period of mental sleep. The universe is vast and men are but tiny specks on an insignificant planet. But the more we realize our minuteness and our impotence in the face of cosmic forces, the more astonishing becomes what human beings have achieved.”

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) logician, one of the first analytic philosophers and political activist

"If We are to Survive this Dark Time", The New York Times Magazine (3 September 1950)
1950s

Men, Art, Suffering, Universe

Quotes about sleep page 2

Quotes about sleep
page 2