“Can death be sleep, when life is but a dream,
And scenes of bliss pass as a phantom by?
---"On death”

“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”

“Death, so called, is a thing which makes men weep, And yet a third of life is passed in sleep.”

“(…) 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. (…).”

“Sleeping is a way of dying or at least of dying to reality, better still it is the death of reality, but reality dies in love as in dreams. The life of man is entirely occupied by the bloody osmosis of dreams and love.”

“Life is a dream from which we wake only when we meet death.”

“O sleepers! what a thing is slumber! Sleep resembles death. Ah, why then dost thou not work in such wise as that after death thou mayst retain a resemblance to perfect life, when, during life, thou art in sleep so like to the hapless dead?”

“Life is just a dream on the way to death.”

“In the fire of love we live, or pass by many ways,
By unnumbered ways of dream to death.”

“Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.”