Quotes about sleep
page 9

“On the one side was the sluggish reptilian will for ease and sleep and death, rising sometimes to active hate and destructiveness; on the other side the still blindfold and blundering will for the lucid and coherent spirit.”

Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) British novelist and philosopher

Part I Crisis, 2. The Modern Age
Darkness and the light (1941/42)

Death, Hate

“(…) Can there be renewal without death? Even the darkness of sleep is refreshing and rejuvenating. Without death we would have been bogged for ever in eternal senility. (…) When life and death are seen as essential to each other, as two aspects of one being, that is immortality. (…).”

Nisargadatta Maharaj (1897–1981) Indian guru

Death
Source: "I am That." P.31.

Life, Death

“Many persons get nothing out of their fasts but hunger and thirst, many more get nothing out of their night prayers but exertions and sleepless nights. Wise and sagacious persons are praiseworthy even if they do not fast and sleep during the nights.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Hunger, Personality, Night

“In that sleep and in sleep to follow the judge did visit. Who would come other? A great shambling mutant, silent and serene. Whatever his antecedents, he was something wholly other than their sum, nor was there system by which to divide him back into his origins for he would not go. Whoever would seek out his history through what unraveling of loins and ledgerbooks must stand at last darkened and dumb at the shore of a void without terminus or origin and whatever science he might bring to bear upon the dusty primal matter blowing down out of the millennia will discover no trace of any ultimate atavistic egg by which to reckon his commencing.”

Cormac McCarthy book Blood Meridian

Blood Meridian (1985)

History, Science

“Judge: "You are prevaricating, sir. Did you or did you not sleep with this woman?"
Co-respondent: "Not a wink, my lord!"”

Donald McGill (1875–1962) British artist

George Orwell "The Art of Donald McGill"

“It was, I saw, a flat to get out of rather than one to stay in. It was a machine for eating and sleeping in, a suitable dwelling place for a working woman, whose main interest is in her work. I disliked this version of myself, which seemed to negate my other activities, reduced them to after-hours amusements, whereas I had always thought them pretty central. These mute, white walls had been silent witnesses to many encounters; nevertheless, they withheld comment, and their very withholding struck me as unfriendly. Unheimlich was the word which came to mind when I stood on the threshold of my bedroom.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

A Friend From England (1987)

“[wrote_the_exam]What keeps me awake at night: wondering whether human species is just too stupid to figure out the Universe. I just wonder. I lose sleep over that. Because we define ourselves as intelligent— because we made up the test to say that. And we sit alone at the top of the intelligence chart because we invented the exam, and all the other species of life on Earth are not. So who's to say that the first species (us) to be intelligent (us) has just enough intelligence to actually decode everything that's decodable in the Cosmos? […] Think of the next closest thing to us, the bonobo chimp— 98½% identical DNA, yet you cannot teach them trigonometry, they have no concept of it. So if that's only 1½% difference in our DNA— and so imagine 1½% beyond us, rather than below us, in intelligence. […] Their toddlers would be talking about things that would completely confound us.”

Neil deGrasse Tyson (1958) American astrophysicist and science communicator

Nerdist podcast, Episode #489 http://www.nerdist.com/2014/03/nerdist-podcast-neil-degrasse-tyson-returns-again/ (2014-04) 2010s

Life, Stupidity, Imagination, Intelligence

“And all o'er heaven is that clear blue
The stars so love to wander through.
They're rising from the silent deep,
Like bright eyes opening after sleep.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Lost Pleiad
The Venetian Bracelet (1829)

Love, Star

“To the somnambulist, sleep-walking may seem more pleasant and less hazardous than wakeful walking, but the latter is the wiser mode of locomotion in the congested traffic of a modern community. It is about time to abandon judicial somnambulism.”

Jerome Frank (1889–1957) American jurist

Page 171.
Law and the Modern Mind (1930)

Communication, Time

“Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.”

Kyril Bonfiglioli (1928–1985) British art dealer

Source: The Mortdecai Trilogy, After You With The Pistol (1979), Ch. 17.

“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,
And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

John Donne book Holy Sonnets

No. 10, line 13
Holy Sonnets (1633)

Death, Past

“This was always the hard part. If you knew what was normal to the enemy, then everything became easy: you could lull them to sleep by feeding them normal, and you could scare the hell out of them by suddenly taking normal away. But normal to Afghans and Chechens was so different from normal to Russians that it took a bit of work for a man like Sokolov to establish what it was.”

Neal Stephenson book Reamde

Day 2
Reamde (2011), Part I: Nine Dragons

Hell, Parting

“I thought, ‘This is just too terrifying. I’ve never seen anything like that before.’ I hadn’t been allowed to watch horror movies before that. I was so traumatized I literally could not sleep for weeks, and it changed my physical appearance; I lost like 10 pounds. My teachers got so concerned they called my mother, ‘Is there something going on – is she being abused at home?’ My mother found a picture of Robert Englund the actor, and Robert Englund in the Freddy Krueger make-up, and pasted them up near my bedside table. So, every night when I’d go to sleep, literally for like a year, I’d have to look at it and think, ‘It’s just a movie, it’s just a movie, it’s not real.’ I remember thinking that I was going to grow up one day, and be an actress and never make a movie that scares little kids.”

Monica Keena (1979) American actress

Discussing A Nightmare on Elm Street in Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy (2010)

Home, Thinking, Teachers, Appearance

“Some young men could not afford to marry or were statutorily forbidden to do so, and then their visits to Japanese brothels engendered guilt as well as VD. The official attitude to taking brown mistresses was always ambivalent. It let the side down, but a sleeping dictionary was the only way to learn the language. Mr Butcher is good on all this, and he gives such tables as one headed ‘Ethnicity of Women from whom European Men Treated at the Sultan Street Clinic Contracted Venereal Disease, 1927-1931.’ The girls of Siam were the great infectresses, but the Malays came a close second. The Japanese, who had regular medical inspections and lived in brothels cleaner than hotels, were down with the Eurasians to 0.4% in 1931. This damnable sex, by no means to be tamed by quinine or cricket. Guilt guilt guilt….”

Anthony Burgess (1917–1993) English writer

Non-Fiction, Homage to QWERT YUIOP: Selected Journalism 1978-1985 (1986)

Women, Men, Disease, Sex

“Dear Richard, I was just coming home from [painting] an interior [with people! ]. It was terribly dark today and yesterday, but today I made a pretty good study. I still sleep badly and feel nervous because of that... I don't need to come to The Hague for my drawing lessons... How long we will stay here [in nl:Heeze ], I don't know. I will write you at least in advance. If I don't start sleeping better I will not stay much longer, I think.”

Suze Robertson (1855–1922) Dutch painter

translation from original Dutch, Fons Heijnsbroek, 2018
(version in original Dutch / origineel citaat van Suze Robertson's brief:) Lieve Richard, Zo eeven kom ik thuis van een interieur [met mensen!]. Het was vandaag en gisteren vreeslijk donker toch heb ik vandaag nogal een goede studie gemaakt. Ik slaap altijd nog slecht en voel me daardoor zenuwachtig.. .Ik hoef nu niet voor lessen [tekenlessen die ze geeft] naar Den Haag te komen.. .hoe lang we hier [in Heeze] blijven, weet ik niet. Ik schrijf het je in elk geval vooruit. Als ik niet beter slaap denk ik voor mij niet lang meer.
Quote of a letter of Suze Robertson from Heeze, July/August 1904, to her husband Richard Bisschop in The Hague; as cited in Suze Robertson 1855-1922 – Schilderes van het harde en zware leven, exhibition catalog, ed. Peter Thoben; Museum Kemperland, Eindhoven, 2008, p. 11
1900 - 1922

People, Feeling, Home, Thinking

““For remember,” he said, “that it is altogether your world now. You and all the rest. We have delivered you from evil, but the evil that is inside men is at the last a matter for men to control. The responsibility and the hope and the promise are in your hands—your hands and the hands of the children of all men on this earth. The future cannot blame the present, just as the present cannot blame the past. The hope is always here, always alive, but only your fierce caring can fan it into a fire to warm the world.”
His voice rang out over the mountain, more impassioned than any of them had ever heard a voice before, and they stood quiet as standing stones, listening.
“For Drake is no longer in his hammock, children, nor is Arthur somewhere sleeping, and you may not lie idly expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. Now especially since man has the strength to destroy this world, it is the responsibility of man to keep it alive, in all its beauty and marvellous joy.””

Susan Cooper (1935) English fantasy writer

Source: The Dark Is Rising (1965-1977), Silver on the Tree (1977), Chapter 20 “One Goes Alone” (p. 272)

Men, Children, Lie, World

“For all in whose hearts he still lives- a watchman of honor who never sleeps.”

William Manchester book The Death of a President

Dedication
The Death of a President (1967)

Heart

“How old are you, Brian? You ought to know by now that something always breaks up love affairs unless both parties are willing to compromise themselves. And that compromising is harder to do the older and less flexible and more independent you are. It just isn’t in you, Brian. You could no more get married now than you could become a priest, or a sculptor, or a greengrocer.”
Duffy opened his mouth to voice angry denials, then one corner turned up and he closed it. “Damn you,” he said wryly. “Then why do I want to, half the time?”
Aurelianus shrugged. “It’s the nature of the species. There’s a part of a man’s mind that can only relax and go to sleep when he’s with a woman, and that part gets tired of always being tensely awake. It gives orders in so loud a voice that it often drowns out the other components. But when the loud one is asleep at last, the others regain control and chart a new course.” He grinned. “No equilibrium is possible. If you don’t want to put up with the constant seesawing, you must either starve the logical components or bind, gag and lock away in a cellar that one insistent one.”
Duffy grimaced and drank some more brandy. “I’m used to the rocking, and I was never one to get motion-sick,” he said. “I’ll stay on the seesaw.”

Tim Powers book The Drawing of the Dark

Aurelianus bowed. “You have that option, sir.”
Source: The Drawing of the Dark (1979), Chapter 18 (p. 247)

Love, Nature, Time, Parting

“The harp that once through Tara's halls
The soul of music shed,
Now hangs as mute on Tara's walls
As if that soul were fled.
So sleeps the pride of former days,
So glory's thrill is o'er;
And hearts that once beat high for praise
Now feel that pulse no more.”

Thomas Moore (1779–1852) Irish poet, singer and songwriter

The Harp That Once Through Tara's Halls, st. 1. Irish Melodies http://www.musicanet.org/robokopp/moore.html (1807–1834)

Music, Feeling, Soul, Heart

“To leave the earth was my wish, and no will stayed my rising.
Early, before sun had filled the roads with carts
Conveying folk to weddings and to murders;
Before men left their selves of sleep, to wander
In the dark of the world like whipped beasts.”

Kenneth Patchen (1911–1972) American writer and poet

" The Temple http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-temple/"

Men, World, Wedding, Sun

“The trees are white with dust, that o'er their sleep
Wave their broad curtains in the south-wind's breath,
While underneath such leafy tents they keep
The long, mysterious Exodus of Death.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

The Jewish Cemetery at Newport, st. 2 (1858).

Death, Tree

“In my sleep, which is the song of the tombs, I have just seen her again, as beautiful as in her youth.”

Albert Cohen (1895–1981) Swiss writer

Le livre de ma mère [The Book of My Mother] (1954)

Youth, Beauty

“We'll be sending a print to the MPAA, we say nothing about it and hope they sleep through the movie.”

Uwe Boll (1965) German restaurateur and former filmmaker

About getting Postal rated Uwe Boll - Transforming Games into Movies http://breakpoint.untergrund.net/torrents/BP07_Seminar_UweBoll_GamesToMovies_XVID.avi.torrent 2000s

Hope

“I may,
if I can,
sleep; since I must,
die.
Some say,
rise.”

Josephine Jacobsen (1908–2003) American-Canadian poet

"The Monosyllable" lines 15–20, The Chinese Insomniacs: New Poems, 1981, University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 0812278186

“If you are eating well and your condition is pure and clean, life itself becomes like the dreams or visions that you have when sleeping.”

Michio Kushi (1926–2014) Japanese educator

Source: Spiritual Journey: Michio Kushi's Guide to Endless Self-Realization and Freedom (1994, with Edward Esko), p. 64

Life, Dreams

“Come, let us sow together the seed of revolution, to awaken the spirit of the sleeping. Come. Let there be no more Bulgar, Greek, Serb or Vlach but only the oppressed serf.”

Yane Sandanski (1872–1915) Bulgarian revolutionary

Yane Sandanski. Letter to the Greeks printed in a newspaper, cited in: Bulgarian Review, Vol. 7-11, (1967). p. 37

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) German writer, artist, and politician

Der Irrthum verhält sich gegen das Wahre wie der Schlaf gegen das Wachen. Ich habe bemerkt, daß man aus dem Irren sich wie erquickt wieder zu dem Wahren hinwende.
Maxim 331, trans. Stopp
Maxims and Reflections (1833)

Truth, Error

“The days, the nights, flow one by one above us,
The hours go silently over our lifted faces,
We are like dreamers who walk beneath a sea.
Beneath high walls we flow in the sun together.
We sleep, we wake, we laugh, we pursue, we flee.”

Conrad Aiken (1889–1973) American novelist and poet

The House of Dust (1916 - 1917)

Sun, Sea, Night

“Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

"Woman," lines 170-171
The Lost World (1965)

Night, Happiness

“Beyond the smiling and the weeping,
I shall be soon;
Beyond the waking and the sleeping,
Beyond the sowing and the reaping,
I shall be soon!
Love, rest, and home —
Sweet hope! Lord, tarry not, but come!”

Horatius Bonar (1808–1889) British minister and poet

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 308.

Love, Smile, Hope, Home

“2788. If you sleep till Noon, you have no right to complain that the Days are short.”

Thomas Fuller (writer) (1654–1734) British physician, preacher, and intellectual

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

“I risked my life. I came back and wore the ribbons and medals that my commanding officer told me to wear. And now you have the audacity to challenge me after serving this country? You sleep under a blanket of freedom that I helped provide. You should just say thank you.”

Michael Grimm (1970) American politician

To Michael Allegretti, Inside City Hall, NY1, (3 September 2010). http://www.wnyc.org/story/103786-mr-incredible-goes-washington-nycs-michael-grimm/ 2010s

Life, Freedom, Help, Country

“My father died of neither hot nor cold. My father was as leathern as a saint. He required no trees. As unrefreshed as a Muslim courtyard. He required no fountain. No music. Whenever he saw a baby he said “poor baby.” His questions were the basic questions, as prosaic as footsteps. What is heaven like? Will I be young? Will I be with Mama? Will I go to sleep? (I don’t know, Papa; how can I know?) Absurdly, I gave answers.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Music, Question, Tree, Baby

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

Aurobindo, from a letter of Sri Aurobindo that C.R. Das was reading out while defending him in the Alipore Bomb Trial. C.R. Das Speech in defence of Aurobindo Ghosh in the Maincktala Bomb Case. The judgement was issued in 1909. Source: Collected Works of Deshbandhu.

Life, Law, Dreams, Idea

“The lone couch of his everlasting sleep.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude (1816), line 57

“O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,
That broodest o’er the troubled sea of the mind
Till it is hush’d and smooth!”

John Keats Endymion

Bk. I, l. 453
Endymion (1818)

Bird, Sea

“Does the sweet morning rise,
Bride-like, from sleep,
When their first revelries
Bird and bee keep,
Singing out joyously
In the green tree?
Then, when my hopes are high,
Think I of thee.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

(5th January 1833) Songs
The London Literary Gazette, 1833-1835

Hope, Bird, Thinking, Tree

“Yes, what I am to be everlastingly, I am growing to be now — now in this present time so little thought of, this time which the sun rises and sets in, and the clock strikes in, and I wake and sleep in.”

William Mountford (1816–1885) English Unitarian preacher and author

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 210.

Time, Sun

“All night I lay awake beside you,
Leaning on my elbow, watching your
Sleeping face, that face whose purity
Never ceases to astonish me.”

Kenneth Rexroth (1905–1982) American poet, writer, anarchist, academic and conscientious objector

In Defense of the Earth (1956), She Is Away

Night

“And then I awoke and yet continued to dream… painting constantly appeared to me as the one and only possible achievement. I thought of my grand old friend Henri Rousseau [French Primitive painter, died in 1910] that Homer in the porter's lodge whose prehistoric dreams have sometimes brought me near the gods. I saluted him in my dream. Near him I saw William Blake, noble emanation of English genius...'Have confidence in your objects,' he said, 'do not let yourself be intimidated by the horror of the world. Everything is ordered and correct and must fulfill its destiny in order to attain perfection. Seek this path'... I awoke and found myself in Holland in the midst of boundless world turmoil. But my belief in the final release and absolution of all things, whether they please or torment, was newly strengthened. Peacefully I laid my head among the pillows… to sleep, and dream, again.”

Max Beckmann (1884–1950) German painter, draftsman, printmaker, sculptor and writer

1930s, On my Painting (1938)

God, World, Dreams, Confidence

“Leave off losings, and take on winnings, Erase all mortal ends, give birth to only new beginnings,
In a billion years of morning and a billion years of sleep.”

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) American writer

Christ, Old Student in a New School (1972)

Birth

“Antony, however, according to his custom, returned alone to his own cell, increased his discipline, and sighed daily as he thought of the mansions in Heaven, having his desire fixed on them, and pondering over the shortness of man's life. And he used to eat and sleep, and go about all other bodily necessities with shame when he thought of the spiritual faculties of the soul. So often, when about to eat with any other hermits, recollecting the spiritual food, he begged to be excused, and departed far off from them, deeming it a matter for shame if he should be seen eating by others.”

Athanasius of Alexandria (295–373) Patriarch of Alexandria

§ 45
Life of Anthony of Egypt

Life, Food, Soul

“How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!”

Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab

Canto I
Queen Mab (1813)

Death

“Sleep, soldiers! still in honored rest
Your truth and valor wearing:
The bravest are the tenderest,—
The loving are the daring.”

Bayard Taylor (1825–1878) United States poet, novelist and travel writer

"The Song of the Camp" (1856), in The Poetical Works of Bayard Taylor (1907), p. 86.

Love, Truth

“I'm so physically deficient that the act of sleep injures me. It's like I disprove evolution and intelligent design at once.”

Brian Clevinger (1978) writer

http://www.nuklearpower.com/daily.php?date=050915

Intelligence

“Remember that Moses led his people through the desert for forty years, and that after twenty years people began to complain… they told Moses that life in the desert was too difficult, and that at least while they were slaves they had had food and water and places to sleep. Moses's friends asked him how long he thought people would be complaining like this, and he replied, "Until the last person born under slavery has died". Our situation is very similar. The psychological gap between eastern and western Germany will last for at least a generation, or perhaps until the last person born under Communism has passed away.”

Lothar de Maizière (1940) German politician

As quoted in "A Wall of Resentment Now Divides Germany" http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/14/world/five-years-later-eastern-europe-post-communism-special-report-wall-resentment.html?pagewanted=all (14 October 1994), by Stephen Kinzer, New York Times, New York

Life, People, Food, Communication

“People like me, people who believe in animal rights, feel the same way about eagles and elephants, pigs and porpoises, as most people feel about cats and dogs. Don't get me wrong. Animal Rights Advocates (ARAs) don't want pigs sleeping in our beds or elephants riding in our cars. We don't want to make “pets” of these animals. What we want is something simpler: we just want people to stop doing terrible things to them.”

Tom Regan book Empty Cages

Prologue
Empty Cages (2004)

People, Dogs, Cars, Way

“You can't speak, you can't sleep,
You daren't move, you're confused.
You never talk, you can't walk
You can't feel, you're not real…”

Mike Oldfield (1953) English musician, multi-instrumentalist

Song lyrics, Earth Moving (1989)

Feeling

“In its studies and learned colloquy, Faz saw and felt the tales of Men. They seemed curiously convoluted, revolving about Self. What mattered most to those who loved tales was how they concluded. Yet all Men knew how each ended. Their little dreams were rounded with a sleep.
So the point of a tale was not how it ended, but what it meant. The great inspiring epic rage of Man was to find that lesson, buried in a grave.”

Gregory Benford (1941) Science fiction author and astrophysicist

Time’s Rub, pp. 260-261
In Alien Flesh (1986)

Love, Men, Dreams, Study

“There are some things I keep sacred. My middle name. Who I sleep with. And what kind of hand moisturizer I use.”

Johnny Weir (1984) figure skater

"Figure Skating Rivalry Pits Athleticism Against Artistry," 2008

“The more I know, the less I sleep.”

Rene Balcer (1954) screenwriter, producer and director

Det. Alexandra Eames in Law & Order: Criminal Intent.
Law & Order: Criminal Intent

“Here is a book so dull that a whirling dervish could read himself to sleep with it. If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead. There is no author's name on the title page, merely a modest line of italic type advising us that Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev's 'short biography' has been composed 'by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee.' This is the one statement in the entire opus which is undeniably true. Only an Institute could write like this.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Brezhnev: A State of Boredom'
Opening lines of his review of the Brezhnev: A Short Biography
Essays and reviews, From the Land of Shadows (1982)

Books, Dogs, Bird, Reading

“Under the market system, there is demand for a product if a lot of people want it - but that demand counts for nothing if those people have no money. If they lack money, their demand essentially doesn't exist…This explains why the drug industry is not investing money to develop a cure for a disease known as sleeping sickness, which leaves its victims in a coma. The disease…killed 66,000 people last year and threatens to infect 60 million more - but the only people who are afflicted by it are poverty-stricken Africans with no clout in the marketplace. Interestingly, there is a drug called eflornithine that is effective in lifting victims out of their comas. But drug companies stopped producing eflornithine in 1995 because it was no longer profitable to continue. The drug was still desperately needed, but only by people without money. So, following modern market practices, these people were simply left in a coma.”

Linda McQuaig (1951) journalist and author

All You Can Eat: Greed, Lust and the New Capitalism (2001)

Money, People, Disease, Affliction

“Beside the garden walls,
We walk in haunts of ancient peace.
At night we rest and go to sleep
In haunts of ancient peace.
The love and light we seek,
The words we do not need to speak,
Here in this wondrous way we keep
These haunts of ancient peace.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

Haunts Of Ancient Peace
Song lyrics, Common One (1980)

Love, Peace, Way, Light

“Inspirations come differently, sometimes you are just sleeping and get a bad dream, others are stories in papers. So people have different stories, it’s about art. I make sure I keep my brains awake.”

Usama Mukwaya (1989) Ugandan screenwriter

Source: " Ugandan film maker: I am living my dream http://www.newvision.co.ug/new_vision/news/1444750/ugandan-film-maker-living-dream#sthash.7Qz8HNn5.dpuf:" at New Vision. 24 January 2017 written by Glorias Musiime

People, Dreams, Art

“Rest comes not from the quantity but from the quality of sleep.”

G. I. Gurdjieff (1866–1949) influential spiritual teacher, Armenian philosopher, composer and writer

Aphorisms

“No one should do a job he can do in his sleep.”

Cory Doctorow Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town

Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town (2005)

“Allah seeks you to thank Him and assigns to you His affairs. He has allowed time in the limited field (of life) so that you may vie with each other in seeking the reward (of Paradise). Therefore, tight up your girdles and wrap up the skirts. High courage and dinners do not go together. Sleep causes weakness in the big affairs of the day and (its) darkness obliterates the memories of courage.”

Ali book Nahj al-Balagha

Nahj al-Balagha

Life, Courage, Memory, Time

“Oh my love, oh my love, I've cried for you so much,
Lonely nights without sleeping, while I longed for your touch.
Now your lips can't evade the heartache I've known,
Come with me to a world of our own.”

Tom Springfield (1934) English musician, songwriter and record producer

Song A World of Our Own.

Love, World, Night

“I could stuff a pillow with the amount of confetti I have had thrown at me. And could I sleep easily on that? No.”

Jeffrey Bernard (1932–1997) British journalist

Ibid. (03.01.87)

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

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

Lever à six, coucher à dix,
Dîner à dix, souper à six,
Font vivre l'homme dix fois dix.
Inscription in Hugo's dining room, quoted in Gustave Larroumet, La maison de Victor Hugo: Impressions de Guernesey (1895), Chapter III

Time

“Oh, give me again the rover's life — the joy, the thrill, the whirl! Let me feel thee again, old sea! let me leap into thy saddle once more. I am sick of these terra firma toils and cares; sick of the dust and reek of towns. Let me hear the clatter of hailstones on icebergs, and not the dull tramp of these plodders, plodding their dull way from their cradles to their graves. Let me snuff thee up, sea-breeze! and whinny in thy spray. Forbid it, sea-gods! intercede for me with Neptune, O sweet Amphitrite, that no dull clod may fall on my coffin! Be mine the tomb that swallowed up Pharaoh and all his hosts; let me lie down with Drake, where he sleeps in the sea.”

Herman Melville book White-Jacket

Source: White-Jacket (1850), Ch. 19

Life, God, Lie, Way

“I was imprisoned in Concepción for a few days and then realeased. They didn't torture me, as I had feared; they didn't even rob me. But they didn't give me anything to eat either, or any kind of covering for the night, so I had to rely on the goodwill of other prisoners, who shared their food with me. In the small hours I could hear them torturing others; I couldn't sleep and there was nothing to read except a magazine in English that someone had left behind. The only interesting article in it was about a house that had once belonged to Dylan Thomas. … I got out of that hole thanks to a pair of detectives who had been at high school with me in Los Ángeles…”

Roberto Bolaño book Last Evenings on Earth

His experience of being imprisoned during the regime of Augusto Pinochet, as depicted in "Dance Card", p. 215
Last Evenings on Earth (2006)

Fear, School, Food, Reading

“I use the example of the rainbow and of the phenomena connected with it, of which sort are the circle around the sun and the stars, likewise the rod lying at the side of the sun or of a star which appears to the eye in a straight line… called the rod by Seneca, and the circle is called the corona, which often has the colors of the rainbow. But neither Aristotle nor Avicenna, in their Natural Histories, has given us knowledge of things of this sort, nor has Seneca, who composed a special book on them. But Experimental Science makes certain of them. [The experimenter] considers rowers and he finds the same colors in the falling drops dripping from the raised oars when the solar rays penetrate drops of this sort. It is the same with waters falling from the wheels of a mill; and when a man sees the drops of dew in summer of a morning lying on the grass in the meadow or the field, he will see the colors. And in the same way when it rains, if he stands in a shady place and if the rays beyond it pass through dripping moisture, then the colors will appear in the shadow nearby; and very frequently of a night colors appear around the wax candle. Moreover, if a man in summer, when he rises from sleep and while his eyes are yet only partly opened, looks suddenly toward an aperture through which a ray of the sun enters, he will see colors. And if, while seated beyond the sun, he extend his hat before his eyes, he will see colors; and in the same way if he closes his eye, the same thing happens under the shade of the eyebrow; and again, the same phenomenon occurs through a glass vessel filled with water, placed in the rays of the sun. Or similarly if any one holding water in his mouth sprinkles it vigorously into the rays and stands to the side of the rays; and if rays in the proper position pass through an oil lamp hanging in the air, so that the light falls on the surface of the oil, colors will be produced. And so in an infinite number of ways, as well natural as artificial, colors of this sort appear, as the careful experimenter is able to discover.”

Roger Bacon book Opus Majus

6th part Experimental Science, Ch.2 Tr. Richard McKeon, Selections from Medieval Philosophers Vol.2 Roger Bacon to William of Ockham
Opus Majus, c. 1267

Books, Color, Way, History

“They say use it, channel it. Do it, like there will be a sign, be an artist, you're so creative, do anything, you've got to do it, use it. Then, things like, and you've got to collect yourself, too. I mean, you know, make your hair more about yourself, self-respect. But I mean, ridiculous. You know why my doctor got so mad this time? He said, that scene, remember in the LSD bit, the only time I had it in that, sleeping with what's-his-name and having that sex bit go on while, it was very strange-mannered, but I certainly wasn't mortified. I mean, I humanly might be a little mortified knowing that a thousand other human beings would think it mortifying, but basically, me. So he thought that was a total lack of self-respect, which is wrong. Totally wrong.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Sex, Thinking, Time, Madness

“[A certain Italian judge] declared in an interview that at night he has no need of sleeping pills since, with regards to the Law, his conscience is at peace. We believe him without further ado. But if he asked himself the same question with regards to Justice, I ask myself if his sleep would be equally untroubled. And we are after all aware that he'll never ask himself this question, and on the contrary it would seem to him totally odd. Because, for an Italian judge, the Law and Justice have nothing to do with each other.”

Indro Montanelli (1909–2001) Italian journalist

Il testimone, p. 386.
2000s - 2010s

Peace, Justice, Law, Question

“That’s the trouble with living in a police state, he said to himself; you think—you imagine—the police are behind everything. You get paranoid and think they’re beaming information to you in your sleep, to subliminally control you. Actually the police wouldn’t do that. The police are our friends.
Or was that idea beamed to me subliminally? he wondered suddenly. “The police are our friends.””

Philip K. Dick (1928–1982) American author

The hell they are!
Source: Lies, Inc. (1984), Chapter 1 (p. 6)

Imagination, Idea, Hell, Thinking

“Yes,” he said. “You see, I, too, have been seeing a lot of things, now that I’ve been spending so much time at the hospital.” He took a deep breath. “One night I got up and went down the hallway to see this woman who was crying. She was an elderly woman and the doctors didn’t know what to do for her. She was dying. I held her hand and stroked her forehead like she was a child. She immediately calmed down and was able to pass over in her sleep so peacefully. “The night nurse was furious, and the next morning she told the doctors what I’d done. They, too, became upset, telling me I didn’t have the authority to visit other patients. That poor nurse and the doctors, they just weren’t prepared to accept the simple truth that they aren’t in control. No one is in control, Mundo. We’re all just God’s guests for a short time.” I don’t know why, but I now asked, “Joseph, are you dying?”

Victor Villaseñor (1940) American writer

He looked at me straight in the eyes. “Yes, Mundo,” he said, “I’m dying.”
Burro Genius: A Memoir (2004)

God, Truth, Time, Cry

“After sleeping late on Sunday, I was back at my desk that afternoon. I had two prime considerations. First, I wanted to be certain that the tapes were not a trap for the committee or that there was a significant bit of missing information that we lacked; experience taught me that matters of this importance do not usually fall into your lap without more complications that are immediately apparent. Second, if our information was legitimate, I wanted to be sure the White House was fully aware of what was to be disclosed so that it could take appropriate action. Legalisms aside, it was inconceivable to me that the White House could withhold the tapes once their existence was made known. I believed it would be in everyone’s interest if the White House realized, before making any public statements, the probable position of both the majority and the minority of the Watergate committee. Even though I had no authority to act for the committee, I decided to call Fred Buzhardt at home. Buzhardt was the only White House staff member with whom I had had any substantial contact. He had been unassuming and straightforward in his dealings with me. He never tried to enlist me in any White House strategy, to suggest that I relay confidential information, or to so any of the things that were probably assumed by many of the so-called sophisticates in Washington.”

Fred Thompson (1942–2015) American politician and actor

page 86
At That Point in Time, Warning the White House about the Watergate tapes

Home, Housing

“We in Africa are always on the receiving end. We have had human slavery, political slavery, economic slavery and now religious slavery. We in the church are saying no. We are prepared to live by what God says, not what you say. Man shall not sleep with man, woman shall not sleep with woman.”

Peter Akinola (1944) Anglican Primate of the Church of Nigeria

Interview with Associated Press http://www.morningsun.net/stories/120803/usw_20031208026.shtml December 2003

God

“If you can't sleep with your own wife wearing a false beard, what can you do?”

John Mortimer (1923–2009) English barrister, dramatist, screenwriter and author

Source: Where There's a Will: Thoughts on the Good Life (2003), Ch. 20 : Law or Justice

Falseness

“He subjected himself in sincerity to the good men whom he visited, and learned thoroughly where each surpassed him in zeal and discipline. He observed the graciousness of one; the unceasing prayer of another; he took knowledge of another's freedom from anger and another's loving-kindness; he gave heed to one as he watched, to another as he studied; one he admired for his endurance, another for his fasting and sleeping on the ground; the meekness of one and the long-suffering of another he watched with care, while he took note of the piety towards Christ and the mutual love which animated all. Thus filled, he returned to his own place of discipline, and henceforth would strive to unite the qualities of each, and was eager to show in himself the virtues of all.”

Athanasius of Alexandria (295–373) Patriarch of Alexandria

§ 4
Life of Anthony of Egypt

Love, Men, Knowledge, Study

“It wasn’t as direct as me saying “I now make the choice to bring the paparazzi into my life.” I really said, “I now make the choice to sleep with Jessica Simpson.” That was stronger than my desire to stay out of the paparazzi’s eye.”

John Mayer (1977) guitarist and singer/songwriter

On deciding to date Jessica Simpson (February 10, 2010), "John Mayer: Playboy Interview" http://www.playboy.com/articles/john-mayer-playboy-interview/index.html?page=1 Playboy. Retrieved February 10, 2010.

Life

“Now I lay me down to sleep
Knowing that your lenses peep
Now I eat my daily bread
And into the tape spool I'll be fed”

Andy Partridge (1953) British musician

"Reel By Real".
Drums and Wires (1979)

“I held out pretty long before I really had an affair, but I got lots of attention from my father physically. He was always trying to sleep with me … from the age of about seven on. Only I resisted that. And one of my brothers who claimed that sisters were there for the purpose of teaching … a sister and brother should teach each other the rules and the game of making love; and I wouldn't fall for that either. I just felt, I had no reason to feel. Nobody told me that incest was a bad thing or anything, but I just didn't feel turned on by them.”

Edie Sedgwick (1943–1971) Socialite, actress, model

Edie : Girl On Fire (2006)

Love, Age, Making love, Feeling

“It's actually quite difficult to stay awake while watch golf on television. It's a great sleep inducer. I think this is why the commentators in golf whisper. They don't want to wake you up. 'Looks like Tiger has about a twenty foot putt, and while he's lining it up I'll take this opportunity to sing "Rock-a-Bye baby,…"”

Jeff Stilson American comedian

Comedy Central Presents Jeff Stilson (2003)

Thinking, Singing, Baby

“You would probably not say that he was sleeping the sleep of the just, unless you meant the just asleep, but it was certainly the sleep of someone who was not fooling about when he climbed into bed of a night and turned off the light.”

Douglas Adams The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Source: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988), Ch. 3

Fools, Light, Night

“What do you mean I can’t sleep with this hooker in the basement?”

Bill Allred

Radio From Hell (June 23, 2005)

“For human tears are lava-drops,
That scorch and wither as they flow;
Then let them flow for those who live,
And not for those who sleep below.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

The Churchyard from The London Literary Gazette (3rd January 1829)
The Vow of the Peacock (1835)

Tear

“His life is a watch or a vision
Between a sleep and a sleep.”

Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837–1909) English poet, playwright, novelist, and critic

Second chorus, lines 57-58.
Atalanta in Calydon (1865)

Life

“I am fighting when I'm sleeping. In my dreams, I must slay the dragon of European heterosexual male society, then I wake up in the morning and be an activist.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, ACTIVISM

Dreams, Fight

“We sleep in peace in the arms of God when we yield ourselves up to His providence, in a delightful consciousness of His tender mercies; no more restless uncertainties, no more anxious desires, no more impatience at the place we are in, for it is God who has put us there, and who holds us in His arms. Can we be unsafe where He has placed us, and where He watches over us as a parent watches a child? This confiding repose, in which earthly care sleeps, is the true vigilance of the heart; yielding itself up to God, with no other support than Him, it thus watches while we sleep. This is the love of Him that will not sleep even in death.”

François Fénelon (1651–1715) Catholic bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 600.

Love, Death, God, Peace

“Put the dwarf within you to sleep.”

Anthony Robbins (1960) Author, actor, professional speaker

Source: Awaken the Giant Within (1992), p. 76

“In June 1576 Maharana Pratap of Chittor had to face Akbar’s armies in the famous battle of Haldighati. Rana Pratap fought with exemplary courage and of his soldiers only a little more than half could leave the field alive. In the darkness of the evening, the wounded Rana left the field on his favourite horse Chetak. A little later, in October, Akbar himself marched in person in pursuit of the Rana, but the latter remained untraced and unsubdued. Later on he recovered all Mewar except Mandalgarh and Chittor. His nearest associates, the Bhil and Lohia tribals, had taken a vow that until their motherland was not freed, they would not eat in metal plates, but only on leaves; they would not sleep on bedsteads, but only on the ground; and they would renounce all comforts. The bravest among them even left Chittor, to return to it only when Mewar had regained independence. That day was not destined to come in their life-time. It was not to come for decades, for generations, for centuries.”

K. S. Lal book The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India

Source: The Legacy of Muslim Rule in India (1992), Chapter 7 citing Smith, Akbar the Great Mogul, p. 108; C.H.I., IV, pp. 115-16.

Life, Courage, Time, Horse

“I'll go where secrets are sold
Where roses unfold
I'll sleep as time goes by”

Katy Rose (1987) American singer

Lemon
Because I Can

Secret, Time

“My parents ask if I'm alright; I say "I've just been staying up too late.
I need to sleep" I need to do something!
To get this awful weight up off my chest,
keep her pretty ghost from chasing me!”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Insound Tour Support No.12 (2000)

Parent

“Death is something inevitable. When a man has done what he considers to be his duty to his people and his country, he can rest in peace. I believe I have made that effort and that is, therefore, why I will sleep for the eternity.”

Nelson Mandela (1918–2013) President of South Africa, anti-apartheid activist

On death, in an interview for the documentary Mandela (1994). Source: From Nelson Mandela By Himself: The Authorised Book of Quotations © 2010 by Nelson R. Mandela and The Nelson Mandela Foundation http://www.nelsonmandela.org/content/mini-site/selected-quotes 1990s

Death, People, Peace, Effort

“On parent knees, a naked new-born child,
Weeping thou sat'st while all around thee smiled;
So live, that sinking in thy last long sleep,
Calm thou mayst smile, while all around thee weep.”

William Jones (1746–1794) Anglo-Welsh philologist and scholar of ancient India

From the Persian, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

Smile, Parent

“The natural philosopher, in addition to the sensations common to all men inspired by the event of death, believes that he sees with more certainty that it is attended with the annihilation of sentiment and thought. He observes the mental powers increase and fade with those of the body, and even accommodate themselves to the most transitory changes of our physical nature. Sleep suspends many of the faculties of the vital and intellectual principle; drunkenness and disease will either temporarily or permanently derange them. Madness or idiotcy may utterly extinguish the most excellent and delicate of those powers. In old age the mind gradually withers; and as it grew and was strengthened with the body, so does it together with the body sink into decrepitude. Assuredly these are convincing evidences that so soon as the organs of the body are subjected to the laws of inanimate matter, sensation, and perception, and apprehension are at an end.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) English Romantic poet

On a Future State (1815; publ. 1840)

Death, Men, Age, Disease

“It takes the average human seven minutes to go to sleep, but according to Hand's Human Physiology, it takes the same average human fifteen to twenty minutes to wake up. It is as if sleep is a pool from which emerging is more difficult than entering. When the sleeper wakes, he or she comes up by degrees, from deep sleep to light sleep to what is sometimes called "waking sleep," a state in which the sleeper can hear sounds and will even respond to questions without being aware of it later…except perhaps as fragments of dreams.”

Stephen King book Pet Sematary

Pet Sematary (1983)

Dreams, Question, Light

“Then you women created a word: "Manscape." And we shaved ourselves bald like nine year-old boys. 'Cause we wanted to sleep with you.”

Christopher Titus (1964) actor, writer, podcaster

Neverlution (2011)

Women, Boy

“We both may be killed by the Muslims, and must put our purity to the ultimate test, so that we know that we are offering the purest of sacrifices, and we should now both start sleeping naked.”

Mahatma Gandhi (1869–1948) pre-eminent leader of Indian nationalism during British-ruled India

Gandhi's comments privately told to Manuben in 1947. Quoted from Hiro, D. (2015). The longest August: The unflinching rivalry between India and Pakistan. New York, NY: Nation Books.
1940s