Sleep quotes
5.3K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside sleep — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Every challenge takes you a little deeper and awakens you again and again. Without the challenges, you probably would go to back to sleep. The challenges keep you awake."
"So my last image was as the first. A sleeping youth cloaked in light, who opened his eyes with a smile of recognition for someone who had never been a stranger."
"I was obsessed with Tupac - like eat, sleep, breathe Tupac. During this obsessive love affair, I dressed the part."
"it takes your sleeping self years to catch up to where you really are. ... when you go on a trip, in your dreams you will still be home. Then after you've come home you'll dream of where you were. It's a kind of jet lag of the consciousness."
"The house shakes...with the roar of the cannon. No sleep for me tonight."
"Insomnia never comes to a man who has to get up exactly at six o'clock. Insomnia troubles only those who can sleep any time."
"One should always sleep in all of one's guest beds, to make sure that they are comfortable."
"I don't want my wife to sleep with anyone but me, and I want to give her the same respect."
"Finally one arrives at this: the state of sleep has an ambiguous function; in sleep, the lack of contact with the culture brings out the worst and also the best in us."
"[Sigmund ] Freud did not under-stand that the dream is a highly creative act, written in the universal language of symbolism, and only secondarily does censorship distort those parts that the subject refuses to accept even in sleep."
"Many students of dreams, from Plato to [Sigmund] Freud, hold that the sleeping person,deprived of contact with the outside world, regresses temporarily to an irrational primitive mental state."
"In the sleeping state, instead, one is much more oneself, even if society never ceases to intervene."
"The average American is not concerned with his society. He talks about it, but you know if one speaks of being concerned, I mean something about which one loses one's sleep, sometimes."
"Sleep is often the only occasion in which man cannot silence his conscience; we forget what we knew in our dream."
"When we sleep the soul is lit up... by many eyes, and with them, we can see everything that we cannot see in the daytime."
"There's a thing that just as you go to sleep, if you keep your elbows elevated that you will never go below the dream stage. And I've used that quite a lot and it keeps me dreaming much longer than if I just relaxed."
"Human relationships are strange. I mean, you are with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stops."
"I don't remember forms or faces now, but I know the girl was beautiful. I know she was; for in the bright moonlight nights, when I start from my sleep, and all is quiet about me, I see, standing still and motionless in one corner of this cell, a slight and wasted figure with long black hair, which streaming down her back, stirs with no earthly wind, and eyes that fix their gaze on me, and never wink or close."
"It will rain all this night and we will sleep transfixed by the dark water as our blood runs through our fragile life."
"'Ornithologists concluded that migratory birds take hundreds of naps as they fly; they also practice unilateral eye closure, in which one eye closes, thereby permitting half the brain to sleep.' Is this what happens when photographers close one eye to look through a viewfinder? If so, they might be operating with only half a brain. Perhaps that explains."
