Dal sonno alla morte è un picciol varco.
Canto IX, stanza 18 (tr. Fairfax)
Gerusalemme Liberata (1581)
“Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them.”
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic
Various forms of this quote are attributed to Poe, primarily by a title card in the movie A Nightmare on Elm Street 3, though there is no record of his having ever said it.
Misattributed
Arthur Schopenhauer book Parerga and Paralipomena
Vol. 2, Ch. 2: Our Relation To Ourselves http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/counsels/chapter2.html <br class="br">Parerga and Paralipomena (1851), Counsels and Maxims <br class="br">Context: Do not shorten the morning by getting up late, or waste it in unworthy occupations or in talk; look upon it as the quintessence of life, as to a certain extent sacred. Evening is like old age: we are languid, talkative, silly. Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death.
“The sounds of early night die down. Mingled with the darkness of his kinsman Death and dripping with Stygian dew, Sleep enfolds the doomed city, pouring heavy ease from his unforgiving horn, and separates the men.”
Primae decrescunt murmura noctis,
cum consanguinei mixtus caligine Leti
rore madens Stygio morituram amplectitur urbem
Somnus et implacido fundit grauia otia cornu
secernitque viros.
Source: Thebaid, Book V, Line 196
“Death was a friend, and sleep was Death's brother.”
John Steinbeck book The Grapes of Wrath
Source: The Grapes of Wrath
S. J. Simon (1904–1948) British bridge player and writer, comic fiction writer
Envoy on Excursion
“I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death”
Nas (1973) American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur
N.Y. State of Mind
On Albums, Illmatic (1994)
Joseph Fouché (1759–1820) French statesman
Inscription placed by his orders on the Gates of the Cemeteries in 1794; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
“Death is not "an eternal sleep!"”
Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794) French revolutionary lawyer and politician
Citizens! efface from the tomb that motto, graven by sacrilegious hands, which spreads over all nature a funereal crape, takes from oppressed innocence its support, and affronts the beneficent dispensation of death! Inscribe rather thereon these words: "Death is the commencement of immortality!" <br class="br">Source: Last speech to the National Convention http://www.bartleby.com/268/7/24.html (26 July 1794)
“How wonderful is Death,
Death and his brother Sleep!”
Percy Bysshe Shelley Queen Mab
Canto I
Queen Mab (1813)
