Quotations about Sleep

Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day. ~Friedrich Nietzsche


If you can't sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It's the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep. ~Dale Carnegie


No day is so bad it can't be fixed with a nap. ~Carrie Snow


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, Macbeth


There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled. ~Edward Lucas


People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one. ~Leo J. Burke


Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep. ~Fran Lebowitz


It's a cruel season that makes you get ready for bed while it's light out. ~Bill Watterson


The bed is a bundle of paradoxes: we go to it with reluctance, yet we quit it with regret; we make up our minds every night to leave it early, but we make up our bodies every morning to keep it late. ~Charles Caleb Colton


A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book. ~Irish Proverb


Life is too short to sleep on low thread-count sheets. ~Leah Stussy


Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience - unless they are still up. ~Ellen Goodman


Sleep... Oh! how I loathe those little slices of death. ~Author unknown, various wordings commonly attributed to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Edgar Allan Poe, and Journey to the Center of the Earth


And if tonight my soul may find her peace
in sleep, and sink in good oblivion,
and in the morning wake like a new-opened flower
then I have been dipped again in God, and new-created.
~D.H. Lawrence


May sleep envelop you as a bed sheet floating gently down, tickling your skin and removing every worry. Reminding you to consider only this moment. ~Jeb Dickerson, www.howtomatter.com


Consciousness: that annoying time between naps. ~Author Unknown


There is no snooze button on a cat who wants breakfast. ~Author Unknown


Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking. ~Clifton Fadiman


Dawn: When men of reason go to bed. ~Ambrose Bierce


The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows. ~Gaston Bachelard


Sleep is perverse as human nature,
Sleep is perverse as legislature....
So people who go to bed to sleep
Must count French premiers or sheep,
And people who ought to arise from bed
Yawn and go back to sleep instead.
~Ogden Nash, Read This Vibrant Exposé


If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters. ~Author unknown, attributed to Jim Davis


Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. ~Author Unknown


Sleep is the interest we have to pay on the capital which is called in at death; and the higher the rate of interest and the more regularly it is paid, the further the date of redemption is postponed. ~Arthur Schopenhauer


A flock of sheep that leisurely pass by
One after one; the sound of rain, and bees
Murmuring; the fall of rivers, winds and seas,
Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky -
I've thought of all by turns, and still I lie
Sleepless...
~William Wordsworth, "To Sleep"


If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he'd make a fortune. ~Griff Niblack


A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow. ~Charlotte Brontë


[S]leep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together. ~Thomas Dekker


People who snore always fall asleep first. ~Author Unknown


Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds. ~JoJo Jensen, Dirt Farmer Wisdom, 2002


When you have insomnia, you're never really asleep, and you're never really awake. ~From the movie Fight Club, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk



The best cure for insomnia is a Monday morning. ~Author Unknown


Now, blessings light on him that first invented sleep! It covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap, and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even. ~Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, 1605


The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


O bed! O bed! delicious bed!
That heaven upon earth to the weary head.
~Thomas Hood, Miss Kilmansegg - Her Dream


There is no hope for a civilization which starts each day to the sound of an alarm clock. ~Author Unknown


It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. ~John Steinbeck


Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it's time to get up. ~Author Unknown


Sleep, rest of things, O pleasing Deity,
Peace of the soul, which cares dost crucify,
Weary bodies refresh and mollify.
~Ovid, attributed


Sometimes I sit up late with my thoughts, reluctant to fall asleep and leave my thoughts alone by themselves. ~Robert Brault, www.robertbrault.com


Don't fight with the pillow, but lay down your head
And kick every worriment out of the bed.
~Edmund Vance Cooke


All men whilst they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own. ~Plutarch


Then, the cool kindliness of sheets, that soon
Smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss
Of blankets....
~Rupert Brooke, "The Great Lover,"


The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep. ~E. Joseph Cossman


Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole.
~Samuel Taylor Coleridge


Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree. ~Ralph Waldo Emerson


Fatigue is the best pillow. ~Benjamin Franklin


O sleep, O gentle sleep,
Nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee,
That thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down
And steep my sense in forgetfulness?
~William Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part I


I'm not asleep... but that doesn't mean I'm awake. ~Author Unknown


Sleep is the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals. ~Vladimir Nabokov


I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps. ~Tom Hodgkinson


It's at night, when perhaps we should be dreaming, that the mind is most clear, that we are most able to hold all our life in the palm of our skull. I don't know if anyone has ever pointed out that great attraction of insomnia before, but it is so; the night seems to release a little more of our vast backward inheritance of instincts and feelings; as with the dawn, a little honey is allowed to ooze between the lips of the sandwich, a little of the stuff of dreams to drip into the waking mind. I wish I believed, as J. B. Priestley did, that consciousness continues after disembodiment or death, not forever, but for a long while. Three score years and ten is such a stingy ration of time, when there is so much time around. Perhaps that's why some of us are insomniacs; night is so precious that it would be pusillanimous to sleep all through it! A "bad night" is not always a bad thing. ~Brian W. Aldiss


The days are cold, the nights are long,
The North wind sings a doleful song;
Then hush again upon my breast;
All merry things are now at rest,
Save thee, my pretty love!
~Dorothy Wordsworth, "The Cottager to Her Infant"


Sleep 'til you're hungry, eat 'til you're sleepy. ~Author Unknown


Sleep: a poor substitute for caffeine. ~Author Unknown


Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay,
And could not win thee, Sleep, by any stealth:
So do not let me wear to-night away.
Without thee what is all the morning's wealth?
Come, blessed barrier between day and day,
Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!
~William Wordsworth, "To Sleep"


The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more. ~Wilson Mizener


In its early stages, insomnia is almost an oasis in which those who have to think or suffer darkly take refuge. ~Colette


A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting. ~Terri Guillemets


Leisure time is that five or six hours when you sleep at night. ~George Allen


But no one ever is allowed in Sleepytown, unless
He goes to bed in time to take the Sleepytown Express!
~James Jackson Montague, The Sleepytown Express


Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone. ~Anthony Burgess


Early to rise and early to bed
Makes a man healthy and wealthy and dead.
~James Thurber, Fables for Our Times, 1940


It appears that every man's insomnia is as different from his neighbour's as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald


How do people go to sleep? I'm afraid I've lost the knack. I might try busting myself smartly over the temple with the night-light. I might repeat to myself, slowly and soothingly, a list of quotations beautiful from minds profound; if I can remember any of the damn things. ~Dorothy Parker


For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one. ~Anne Morrow Lindbergh


Cut if you will with sleep's dull knife
The years from off your life, my friend!
The years that death takes off my life,
He'll take from off the other end!
~Edna St. Vincent Millay


There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night. ~Marie de Rabutin-Chantal


Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants. ~Jessamyn West


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