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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"People who wish to numb our caution in dealing with them by means of flattery are employing a dangerous expedient, like a sleeping draught, which, if it does not put us to sleep, keeps us all the more awake."
"They tell me: If you see a slave sleeping, do not wake him lest he be dreaming of freedom. I tell them: If you see a slave sleeping, wake him and explain to him freedom."
"Give a man a reputation as an early riser and he can sleep 'til noon."
"Well enough for old folks to rise early, because they have done so many mean things all their lives they can't sleep anyhow."
"Alas! those good old days are gone, when a murderer could wipe the stain from his name and soothe his trouble to sleep simply by getting out his blocks and mortar and building an addition to a church."
"From a night of more sleep than she had expected, Marianne awoke the next morning to the same consciousness of misery in which she had closed her eyes."
"All right. If you insist. I do not sleep with girls. No, no, no, let me be absolutely accurate. I've gone through the motions of sleeping with girls exactly three times, all of them disastrous. The word for my sex life now is nil. Or as you Americans would say, "plenty of nuttin'."
"So it comes to this; one doesn’t need rest. Why bother about sleep if one isn’t sleepy? That stands to reason, doesn’t it? Wait a minute, there’s a snag somewhere; something disagreeable. Why, now, should it be disagreeable? …Ah, I see; it’s life without a break."
"Keep us, Lord, so awake in the duties of our calling that we may sleep in thy peace and wake in thy glory."
"When I was a child I truly loved: Unthinking love as calm and deep As the North Sea. But I have lived, And now I do not sleep."
"Please don't wake me, no, don't shake me, leave me where I am, I'm only sleeping."
"I'm up all night against my will My medicine won't let me feel anything at all The doctor gave me sleeping pills and I took one Then I feel all alone, sleeping like a stone."
"You can't breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence."
"Our lives are rounded with a sleep."
"I felt quite at home, / As if it were mine sleeping lazily / In this house of fresh air."
"I've been writing joke songs since I was a kid and it served me well at S.N.L. I can write those in my sleep. In fact, I have."
"Blessed be he who invented sleep, a cloak that covers all a man's thoughts."
"...people don't respect the morning. An alarm clock violently wakes them up, shatters their sleep like the blow of an ax, and they immediately surrender themselves to deadly haste. Can you tell me what kind of day can follow a beginning of such violence? What happens to people whose alarm clock daily gives them a small electric shock? Each day they become more used to violence and less used to pleasure."
"I grew up around poets and novelists and my dad wrote poems about everything - from a cat sleeping in a window to a car wreck he passed on the highway. I learned not to censor myself: that was one of things I learned in my apprenticeship, my creative-writing apprenticeship with my dad."
"I don't want to go on being a root in the dark, vacillating, stretched out, shivering with sleep, downward, in the soaked guts of the earth, absorbing and thinking, eating each day."
