A collection of quotes on the topic of sleep, sleeping, likeness, night.
Saturday Night Live (1993)
Quoted in Marconi and Tesla: Pioneers of Radio Communication (2008) by Tim O'Shei, ISBN 159845076X , p. 5
“I never sleep, cause sleep is the cousin of death”
N.Y. State of Mind
On Albums, Illmatic (1994)
“The moon has set,
And the Pleiades.
Midnight.
The hour has gone by.
I sleep alone.”
Stanley Lombardo translations, Frag. 72
This has commonly been attributed to Orwell but has not been found in any of his writings. Quote Investigator http://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/11/07/rough-men/ found the earliest known appearance in a 1993 Washington Times essay by Richard Grenier: "As George Orwell pointed out, people sleep peacefully in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf." The absence of quotation marks indicates Grenier was using his own words to convey Orwell's opinion; thus it may have originated as a paraphrase of his statement in "Notes on Nationalism" https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/orwelnat.htm (May 1945): "Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." There are also similar sentiments expressed in an essay which Orwell wrote on Rudyard Kipling, quoting from one of Kipling's poems: "Yes, making mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep." In the same essay Orwell also wrote of Kipling: "He sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them."
Misattributed
“two people can sleep in the same bed and still be alone when they close their eyes”
Source: Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
Dear Mr. President, featuring the Indigo Girls, written by Pink and Billy Mann
Song lyrics, I'm Not Dead (2006)
Source: The Complete Poems
Source: The Book of Disquiet
“There is no such thing as over training. You’re either under eating or under sleeping.”
“I'd like to die like my old dad, peacefully in his sleep, not screaming like his passengers.”
Guardian obituary http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/dec/30/guardianobituaries.artsobituaries
“I have promises to keep and miles to go before I sleep.”
"Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (1923) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171621
Variant: And miles to go before I sleep.
Context: The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Variant: Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Source: Thirst
Widely attributed to Luther, but actually is an example given in 1658 book Ἑρμηνεια logica https://books.google.com/books?id=2MxlAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA228| of faulty logic. In Latin:
Si vero termini in sorite sunt causae subordinatae per accidens, sorites non valet; ut ia hoc, Qui bene bibit, bene dormit; qui bene dormit, non peccat; qui non peccat, est beatus; ergo: qui bene bibit est beatus. Vitium est, quod bene bibere sit causa per accidens somni.
Translated via Fauxtations https://fauxtations.wordpress.com/2016/08/21/drinking-and-not-sinning/:
If, however, the conclusions in the sorite are subordinate by accident, the sorites is not valid; as in this one, He who sleeps well, drinks well; he who sleeps well, does not sin; he who does not sin, is blessed; therefore, he who drinks well is blessed. The problem is that to drink well is a cause of sleep only by accident.
Disputed
Source: Wintergirls
Interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g-U2-cAUMM
“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.”
Statement made after the attack on Pearl Harbor by Yamamoto as portrayed in the film Tora! Tora! Tora!, this is one of the most quoted remarks attributed to him. Though it is thought that it summarizes his sentiments well, a definite source for this quote has never been provided. William Safire wrote that there is no printed evidence to support this quote. Safire's Political Dictionary, page 666. http://books.google.com/books?id=c4UoX6-Sv1AC&pg=PA666 For more information see the Wikipedia article "Isoroku Yamamoto's sleeping giant quote".
Disputed
“Death is not "an eternal sleep!"”
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!"
Source: Last speech to the National Convention http://www.bartleby.com/268/7/24.html (26 July 1794)
“We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”
Prospero, Act IV, scene i.
Source: The Tempest (1611)
Source: Clockwork Prince
“If I could drown in sleep as I drown in fear I would be no longer alive.”
Source: Letters to Milena
From a letter now regarded as a forgery by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz http://www.aproposmozart.com/Stafford%20--%20Mozart%20and%20genius.rev.ref.pdf, http://www.mozartforum.com/Lore/article.php?id=108, http://www.mozartforum.com/Lore/article.php?id=106
Misattributed
Context: When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them.
Source: Out of Africa (1937)
Context: People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. They also know that the real glory of dreams lies in their atmosphere of unlimited freedom. It is not the freedom of the dictator, who enforces his own will on the world, but the freedom of the artist, who has no will, who is free of will. The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colours, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of...
“Many solemn nights
Blond moon, we stand and marvel…
Sleeping our noons away”
Source: Japanese Haiku
“I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me.”
Source: The Collected Poems
“Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone.”
“Come sleep with me: We won't make Love, Love will make us.”
“I cannot sleep unless I am surrounded by books.”
“sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man
the most guilty.”
Source: Letters to Milena
"Elm" http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/elm.html
Source: Ariel (1965)
Context: p>I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.</p
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Source: A Room of One's Own (1929), Ch. 1, p. 18
Context: The human frame being what it is, heart, body and brain all mixed together, and not contained in separate compartments as they will be no doubt in another million years, a good dinner is of great importance to good talk. One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.
“The main facts in human life are five: birth, food, sleep, love and death.”
“We are born from a quiet sleep, and we die to a calm awakening”
Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 29
“"When I sleep too much I don't score. That's the reason I like to go out a lot."”
Quando durmo muito, não faço gols, por isso gosto de ficar na noite.
Source: Veja Magazine; 1895 Edition. March 9th, 2005.
Context: Romário was seen in different night clubs during his carreer while being the top scorer in almost every major competition he played in.
As quoted in "It's Monica Mania" by Richard Corliss in TIME (10 March 2003) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1004378,00.html
“Sleep. Those little slices of death. How I loathe them.”
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
1975 interview http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7073441.stm
“Sex and sleep alone make me conscious that I am mortal.”
As quoted in Alexander the Great (1973) by Robin Lane Fox
Unsourced variant : Only sex and sleep make me conscious that I am mortal.
2000s, 2004, 2004 Video Broadcast on Al-Jazeera October 29
Inscription placed by his orders on the Gates of the Cemeteries in 1794; reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).
The New York Times [obituary] (1965-08-28)
Attributed from posthumous publications
2010s, Tawakul Karman, Yemeni activist, and thorn in the side of Saleh (2011)
Source: The Big Sleep (1939), Chapter 32, Phillip Marlowe
Context: What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. Far more a part of it than Rusty Regan was. But the old man didn't have to be. He could lie quiet in his canopied bed, with his bloodless hands folded on the sheet, waiting. His heart was a brief, uncertain murmur. His thoughts were as gray as ashes. And in a little while he too, like Rusty Regan, would be sleeping the big sleep.
Narrated in Bukhari by Abu Huraira, Vol. 9, Book 87, Hadith 141 http://sunnah.com/bukhari/91/31
Sunni Hadith
Miles "Pudge" Halter about Alaska Young, p. 88
Looking for Alaska (2005)
“Men grow tired of sleep, love, singing and dancing, sooner than of war.”
A misquotation http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/ads-l/2009-August/092648.html of:
Πάντων μὲν κόρος ἐστὶ καὶ ὕπνου καὶ φιλότητος
μολπῆς τε γλυκερῆς καὶ ἀμύμονος ὀρχηθμοῖο,
τῶν πέρ τις καὶ μᾶλλον ἐέλδεται ἐξ ἔρον εἷναι
ἢ πολέμου· Τρῶες δὲ μάχης ἀκόρητοι ἔασιν.
Men get
Their fill of all things, of sleep and love, sweet song
And flawless dancing, and most men like these things
Much better than war. Only Trojans are always
Thirsty for blood!
Iliad, XIII, 636–639 (tr. Ennis Rees)
The misquotation implies that an overweening love of war was the norm, whereas the real quote decries the Trojans as inhumane for keeping the war going.
Misattributed
“Cats have it all - admiration, an endless sleep, and company only when they want it.”
“And sleep, that sometime shuts up sorrow's eye, Steal me awhile from mine own company.”
Source: A Midsummer Night's Dream
“I put a piece of paper under my pillow, and when I could not sleep I wrote in the dark.”
Source: Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements
“He was stupid. If I killed everyone who was stupid, I wouldn't have time to sleep.”
Source: In the Hand of the Goddess
“Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep, a bath and a glass of wine”
Source: Rilke's Book of Hours: Love Poems to God
Source: Awakened
Source: Iron Kissed
As quoted in Funny Ladies (2001), by B. Adler, p. 147
“The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream.”
“Just as a well-filled day brings blessed sleep, so a well-employed life brings a blessed death.”
“I read like a wolf eats.
I read myself to sleep every night.”
“In every man sleeps a prophet, and when he wakes there is a little more evil in the world.”
A Short History of Decay (1949)
Source: Kafka on the Shore
