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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"I thought of the people before me who had looked down at the river and gone to sleep beneath it. I wondered about them. I wondered how they had done it--it, the physical act. I simply wondered about the dead because their days had ended and I did not know how I would get through mine."
"Next time you see someone sleeping, make believe you're in a science fiction movie. And whisper, 'The creature is regenerating itself.'"
"I never took reds or Quaaludes to balance out the coke. So when it got to be four in the morning and the gram was three quarters gone, I'd start wishing it was nine o'clock and hoping the guy got up early. But, of course, he didn't sleep either, so there was no sweat. During all those years, I was always looking forward to the next snort or the next guy I could score from."
"Ah, I often think it's wi' th' old folks as it is wi' the babies; they're satisfied wi' looking, no matter what they're looking at. It's God A'mighty's way o' quietening 'em, I reckon, afore they go to sleep."
"Jessica stopped beside him, said: 'What delicious abandon in the sleep of a child.' He spoke mechanically: 'If only adults could relax like that.' 'Yes.' 'Where do we lose it?' he murmured. 'We do, indeed, lose something,' she said."
"When you're playing a spirit from another dimension, you really can do anything and get as abstract as you want and still have a context that will work within the movie. I wanted Ghost Rider to move in a way where it would be like a bad dream. I thought about cobra snakes, and the way that they will show you their backs and sway in a rhythmic motion and almost lull you to sleep before suddenly attacking. Well, I put that into the movie. And I decided to move my head in the jerky way a praying mantis does. So, I did all these things to give the movie a feeling of otherness."
"I think Prabhupada's accomplishments are very significant; they're huge. Even compared to someone like William Shakespeare, the amount of literature Prabhupada produced is truly amazing. It boggles the mind. He sometimes went for days with only a few hours sleep. I mean even a youthful, athletic young person couldn't keep the pace he kept himself at seventy-nine years of age."
"When Clark Gable died, I cried for 2 days straight. I couldn't eat or sleep."
"Nights are not just for sleep."
"His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image."
"I need to sleep, but fear to dream."
"I just need to rest, that’s all, to rest and sleep some, and maybe die a little."
"Sleep is a little death, dreams the whisperings of the Other, who would drag us all into his eternal night."
"If there is one fact we really can prove, from the history that we really do know, it is that despotism can be a development, often a late development and very often indeed the end of societies that have been highly democratic. A despotism may almost be defined as a tired democracy. As fatigue falls on a community, the citizens are less inclined for that eternal vigilance which has truly been called the price of liberty; and they prefer to arm only one single sentinel to watch the city while they sleep."
"The good Bishop of Assisi expressed a sort of horror at the hard life which the Little Brothers lived at the Portiuncula, without comforts, without possessions, eating anything they could get and sleeping anyhow on the ground. St. Francis answered him with that curious and almost stunning shrewdness which the unworldly can sometimes wield like a club of stone. He said, 'If we had any possessions, we should need weapons and laws to defend them."
"He said he didn't very well understand how George was going to sleep any more than he did now, seeing that there were only twenty-four hours in each day."
"Free verse'? You may as well call sleeping in a ditch 'free architecture'."
"Each of us has his own way of emerging from the underworld, mine is by writing. That's why the only way I can keep going, if at all, is by writing, not through rest and sleep. I am far more likely to achieve peace of mind through writing than the capacity to write through peace."
"He hated the men floating in sleep in the big stone houses. Because their lives were ordered and their rooms tidy. Because they got up every morning and did their public work. Because they weren't going to dynamite their factories and have naked parties in the fire."
"I felt like if any two people had any kind of sexual affinity for each other they had to sleep with each other immediately, otherwise it was a terrible betrayal and waste...Fortunately, I'm relieved of those obsessions now. It's really wonderful. It's really wonderful not feeling you have to sleep with everybody."
