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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"On your eyelids crown the god of sleep, Charming your blood with pleasing heaviness, Making such difference 'twixt wake and sleep As is the difference betwixt day and night The hour before the heavenly-harness'd team Begins his golden progress in the east."
"Day, night, late, early, At home, abroad, alone, in company, Waking or sleeping, still my care hath been To have her match'd; and having now provided A gentleman of princely parentage, Of fair demesnes, youthful, and nobly train'd, Stuff'd, as they say, with honourable parts, Proportion'd as one's thought would wish a man- And then to have a wretched puling fool, A whining mammet, in her fortune's tender, To answer 'I'll not wed, I cannot love; I am too young, I pray you pardon me'!"
"Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep."
"For some must watch, while some must sleep So runs the world away"
"The undeserver may sleep when the man of action is called on."
"Thy best of rest is sleep, And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st Thy death, which is no more."
"O sleep, O gentle sleep, Nature's soft nurse, how have I frightened thee, 1710. That thou no more will weigh my eyelids down, And steep my senses in forgetfulness?"
"Come, blessed barrier between day and day, Dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!"
"Mark the babe not long accustomed to this breathing world; One that hath barely learned to shape a smile, though yet irrational of soul, to grasp with tiny finger - to let fall a tear; And, as the heavy cloud of sleep dissolves, To stretch his limbs, becoming, as might seem. The outward functions of intelligent man."
"The rest and the spell of sleep in the middle of the day refresh the human frame far more than a long night. We were not made by Nature to work, or even to play, from eight o'clock in the morning till midnight. We throw a strain upon our system which is unfair and improvident. For every purpose of business or pleasure, mental or physical, we ought to break our days and our marches into two."
"A man who gets the reputation of rising at dawn can sleep to noon."
"You must sleep sometime between lunch and dinner, and no halfway measures. Take off your clothes and get into bed. That's what I always do."
"I've always liked, someday the lamb will lay by the lion.... but it won't get much sleep."
"The audience goes to sleep really quickly! If you have a slight pause at the wrong time, that's it!"
"I never knew what Amazon was. I've never seen any of those series, even on cable. I've never seen The Sopranos, or Mad Men. I'm out every night and when I come home, I watch the end of the baseball or basketball game, and there's Charlie Rose and I go to sleep."
"Daytime sleep is like the sin of the flesh; the more you have the more you want, and yet you feel unhappy, sated and unsated at the same time."
"And so I fell devoutly asleep and slept a long time, because young people seem to need sleep more than the old, who have already slept so much and are preparing to sleep for all eternity."
"Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.... Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist's business is lying.... Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don't tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming, another third of it spent in telling lies."
"Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone."
"We sleep researchers like cats, you know; they sleep a lot!"
