Sleep Quotes

To sleep! perchance to dream ay there's the rub For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil Must give us pause.

William Shakespeare

O sleep O gentle sleep Nature's soft nurse.

William Shakespeare

Hush my dear lie still and slumber! Holy angels guard they bed! Heavenly blessings without number Gently falling on thy head.

Isaac Watts

The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed and can't get there is the meanest feeling in the world.

Edgar Watson Howe

Did anyone ever have a boring dream?

Ralph Hodgson

The sleep of a labouring man is sweet whether he eat little or much but the abundance of the rich will not suffer him to sleep.

Bible

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care The death of each day's life sore labour's bath Balm of hurt minds great nature's second course Chief nourisher in life's feast.

William Shakespeare

Over my slumber your loving watch keep - Rock me to sleep mother rock me to sleep.

Elizabeth Akers Allen

Fatigue is the best pillow.

Benjamin Franklin

Sleep is the best cure for waking troubles.

Miguel de Cervantes

One hour's sleep before midnight is worth three after.

George Herbert

Soft closer of our eyes! Low murmur of tender lullabies!

John Keats

Sleep rest of nature O sleep most gentle of the divinities peace of the soul thou at whose presence care disappears who soothest hearts wearied with daily employments and makest them strong again for labour!

Ovid

I will both lay me down in peace and sleep: for thou Lord only makest me dwell in safety.

Bible

He giveth His beloved sleep.

Bible

I never sleep comfortably except when I am at sermon or when I pray to God.

François Rabelais

To all to each a fair goodnight And pleasing dreams and slumbers light.

Walter Scott

People who are contented and serene sleep well. They fall asleep easily, stay asleep, and wake refreshed. Conversely, people who are anxious, stressed, or depressed do not sleep well, and chronic insomnia is strongly associated with mood disorders. These are clear correlations, but what is cause and what is effect is not clear. Most experts agree that sleep and mood are closely related, that healthy sleep can enhance emotional well-being, while insufficient quantity or quality of sleep can adversely affect it.

Andrew Weil

Nick drank the coffee, the coffee according to Hopkins. The coffee was bitter. Nick laughed. It made a good ending to the story. His mind was starting to work. He knew he could choke it because he was tired enough. He spilled the coffee out of the pot and shook the grounds loose into the fire. He lit a cigarette and went inside the tent. He took off his shoes and trousers, sitting on the blankets, rolled the shoes up inside the trousers for a pillow and got in between the blankets.Out through the front of the tent he watched the glow of the fire when the night wind blew on it. It was a quiet night. The swamp was perfectly quiet. Nick stretched under the blanket comfortably. A mosquito hummed close to his ear. Nick sat up and lit a match. The mosquito was on the canvas, over his head. Nick moved the match quickly up to it. The mosquito made a satisfactory hiss in the flame. The match went out. Nick lay down again under the blankets. He turned on his side and shut his eyes. He was sleepy. He felt sleep coming. He curled up under the blanket and went to sleep.

Ernest Hemingway

Death's brother, sleep.

Virgil

All my life I have been a poor go-to-sleeper. No matter how great my weariness, the wrench of parting with consciousness is unspeakably repulsive to me. I loathe Somnus, that black-masked headsman binding me to the block; and if in the course of years I have got so used to my nightly ordeal as almost to swagger while the familiar axe is coming out of its great velvet-lined case, initially I had no such comfort or defense: I had nothing - save a door left slightly ajar into Mademoiselle's room. Its vertical line of meek light was something I could cling to, since in absolute darkness my head would swim, just as the soul dissolves in the blackness of sleep.

Vladimir Nabokov

Sleep is a daily reminder from God that we are not God. Once a day God sends us to bed like patients with a sickness. The sickness is a chronic tendency to think we are in control and that our work is indispensable. To cure us of this disease God turns us into helpless sacks of sand once a day.

John Piper

You look tired," Rachel told Jason."I wish I could jog and sleep at the same time.""Can't you?" Ferrin asked, joining them at the little cascade. "I always imagined that you could sleep rolling down a mountainside in a barrel.""I probably could today," Jason conceded.

Brandon Mull

Sleep, that deplorable curtailment of the joy of life.

Virginia Woolf

What pillow can one have like a good conscience?

John Steinbeck

Speech, tennis, music, skiing, manners, love- you try them waking and perhaps balk at the jump, and then you're over. You've caught the rhythm of them once and for all, in your sleep at night. The city, of course, can wreck it. So much insomnia. So many rhythms collide. The salesgirl, the landlord, the guests, the bystanders, sixteen varieties of social circumstance in a day. Everyone has the power to call your whole life into question here. Too many people have access to your state of mind. Some people are indifferent to dislike, even relish it. Hardly anyone I know.

Renata Adler

Our nights are different. She falls asleep like someone yielding to the gentle tug of a warm tide, and floats with confidence till morning. I fall asleep more grudgingly, thrashing at the waves, either reluctant to let a good day depart or still bitching about a bad one. Different currents run through our spells of unconsciousness.

Julian Barnes

I used to be free spirited, now I'm just free of sleep. I got a burning passion in my throat. I got a burning passion inside me.

Tegan Quin

Ah, wonderful sleep. I love to sleep. It's one of the things I'm really good at.

Kate Johnson

My brain has become my enemy. We fight over creation and his need for sleep.

Darnell Lamont Walker

I was through with sleep. I didn't like what it brought me.

Ali Cross

...at dawn, the grains of sleep turn to floating black spots, then out of focus the world tilts, and the cat scratches at the door...

John Geddes

Whatever we may say, all of us suffer from disturbed sleep at times.Some in truth hardly sleep, though some who sleep copiously swear that they do not.Some are disquieted by incessant dreams, and a fortunate few are visited often by dreams of delightful character.Some will say that they were at one time troubled in sleeping but have 'recovered' from it, as though awareness were a disease, as perhaps it is.

Gene Wolfe

She had not heard him enter, and hardly realized his presence there. She was yawning, and he saw the red interior of her mouth as if it had been a snake's. She had stretched one arm so high above her coiled-up cable of hair that he could see its satin delicacy above the sunburn; her face was flushed with sleep, and her eyelids hung heavy over their pupils. The brim-fulness of her nature breathed from her. It was a moment when a woman's soul is more incarnate than at any other time; when the most spiritual beauty bespeaks itself flesh; and sex takes the outside place in the presentation.

Thomas Hardy

He doesn't mind if he dies... indeed, he would like to die; but yet he fears to fall. He would welcome a long sleep; but not at the price of falling to it.

William Golding

Is there anywhere else to sleep tonight... Anywhere?' I pleaded.There's Mei's office, but you'll have to sleep on the floor I'm afraid.' Mei was one of the Ward 9D dietitians.'I'll sleep on the floor any day. I'm used to it back in the Islands,' I laughed tiredly.I settled down on the floor. The three rugs I had brought to cushion my back worked surprisingly well. It was almost more comfortable than the thin mats on the cold concrete floors of the fales in Samoa. The idea of sleeping in someone's office was the best idea I had had all year. I decided that I would keep this secret to myself.

Ta'afuli Andrew Fiu

Isn't there someone kind enough to come strangle me in my sleep?

Ryūnosuke Akutagawa

A while later, I lingered in the hinterlands of sleep. Sometimes I think there is more rest in that place between wakefulness and sleep than there is in true sleep. The mind walks in the twilight of both states, and finds the truths that are hidden alike by daylight and dreams. Things we are not ready to know abide in that place, awaiting that unguarded frame of mind.

Robin Hobb

Precious is sleep, better to be of stone,while the oppression and the shame still last;not seeing and not hearing, I am blest;so do not wake me, hush! keep your voice down.

Michelangelo Buonarroti

And if I do fall asleep, Marla has to keep track of Tyler. Where he goes. What he does. So maybe during the day, I can rush around and undo the damage.

Chuck Palahniuk

Our dreams are little stories or puzzles that we must solve to be free, Sebastian said. He was reading out loud from Wilson's notebook. My dream is me offering me a solution to the conundrum of my life. My dream is me offering me something that I need and my responsibility to myself is to try to understand what it means. Our dreams are a thin curtain between survival and extinction.

Miriam Toews

Sonnet LXXXI And now you're mine. Rest with your dream in my dream. Love and pain and work should all sleep, now. The night turns on its invisible wheels, and you are pure beside me as a sleeping ember. No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go together, over the waters of time. No one else will travel through the shadows with me, only you, evergreen, ever sun, ever moon. Your hands have already opened their delicate fists and let their soft drifting signs drop away; your eyes closed like two gray wings, and I move after, following the folding water you carry, that carries me away. The night, the world, the wind spin out their destiny. Without you, I am your dream, only that, and that is all.

Pablo Neruda

Never lose sleep over someone who is not worth staying awake for.

Habeeb Akande

I wanted to sleep with you. I thought about throwing you over my couch fifty different ways, but I haven’t because I don’t see you that way anymore. It’s not that I’m not attracted to you, I just think you’re better than that.

Jamie McGuire

Happiness consists in getting enough sleep. Just that, nothing more. All the wealthy, unhappy people you're ever met take sleeping pills; Mobile Infantrymen don't need them. Give a cap trooper a bunk and time to sack out in it and he's as happy as a worm in an apple - asleep.

Robert A. Heinlein

It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats.

Neil Gaiman

Making love to a person in their sleep is the only guarantee they'll wake up with a smile on their face.

Bauvard

Sometimes, as Eve was born from one of Adam’s ribs, a woman was born during my sleep from a cramped position of my thigh. Formed from the pleasure I was on the point of enjoying, she, I imagined, was the one offering it to me. My body, which felt in hers my own warmth, would try to find itself inside her, I would wake up. The rest of humanity seemed very remote compared to this woman I had left scarcely a few moments before; my cheek was still warm from her kiss, my body aching from the weight of hers. If, as sometimes happens, she had the features of a woman I had known in life, I would devote myself entirely to this end: to finding her again, like those who go off on a journey to see a longed-for city with their own eyes and imagine that one can enjoy in reality the charm of a dream. Little by little, the memory of her would fade, I had forgotten the girl of my dream.

Marcel Proust

A 2002 Oxford study showed counting sheep actually delays the onset of sleep. It's just too dull to stop us from worrying about jobs and spouses

A.J. Jacobs

Thy best of rest is sleep,And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'stThy death, which is no more.

William Shakespeare

Groping blindly in the darkness, he sank between the white mounds of cool feathers and slept as he fell, across the bed or with his head downward, pushing deep into the softness of the pillows, as if in sleep he wanted to drill through, to explore completely, that powerful massif of feather bedding rising out of the night.

Bruno Schulz

When assaulted by sexual knowledge for the first time, a girl plunges into a period of blackness, which is required in order to let her emotions catch up with her body.Sleeping Beauty sleeps. Cinderella waits, and while she waits she works her way through the darkness of depression. Snow White both works and sleeps before she is ready to open her eyes and find a Prince leaning over her.

Joan Gould

The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

Arnold Bennett

And she was not beautiful asleep. Her expression slack and not angelic. The very ordinariness of it so beautiful he felt a yearning to be something more than he was or could be. And as good a player as he was, he knew as he turned on the reel to reel and hugged the Fender once again that nothing he composed would ever be as beautiful as her ordinary sleep.Watching her he played the music of her sleeping. And by surrendering made something beautiful.

Steven R. Boyett

Whatever it may bring, I will live by my own policies, I will sleep with a clear conscience, I will sleep in peace.

Sinead O'Connor

I didn’t mean to snore in your ear, but I wanted to inhale all of what was wrapped up in the comforter with me.

Darnell Lamont Walker

When a man can't sleep, he won't let anybody else sleep either. If he doesn't go off to dreamland the moment his head hits the pillow, he gets frightfully annoyed and won't stay in bed.

Carter Dickson

Gen was sleeping the sleep of the heavily drugged.

Ann Patchett

With great power comes a great need to take a nap.

Rick Riordan

1 2 3 … 17 Next

Sleep Quotes

Related Topics