quotations about sleep
To sleep! perchance to dream; ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Hamlet
My bones wish to escape
And run along an alien expanse
To collapse from the heat
In a cartoonish heap
To sleep oh to sleep
SPARKLEHORSE
"Box of Stars"
Sleep delays my life (get up, get up)
R.E.M.
"Get Up"
Thee are the spells that to kind sleep invite,
And nothing does within resistance make,
Which yet we moderately take;
Who would not choose to be awake.
ABRAHAM COWLEY
The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley
Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light.
BIBLE
Ephesians 5:14
Sleep comes like a drug in God's country
Sad eyes, crooked crosses, in God's country
Set me alight, we'll punch a hole right through the night.
Every day the dreamers die to see what's on the other side.
U2
"In God's Country"
There is a knowledge in the heart of sleep.
SRI AUROBINDO
Gems from Sri Aurobindo
Come, mild and magnificent Sleep, and let your tides flow through the nation. Oh, daughter of unmemoried desire, sister of Death, and my stern comrade, Loneliness, bringer of peace and dark forgetfulness, healer and redeemer, dear enchantress, hear us: come to us through the fields of night, over the plains and rivers of the everlasting earth, bringing to the huge vexed substance of this world and to all the fury, pain, and madness of our lives the merciful anodyne of your redemption. Seal up the porches of our memory, tenderly, gently, steal our lives away from us, blot out the vision of lost love, lost days, and all our ancient hungers, great Transformer, heal us!
THOMAS WOLFE
From Death to Morning
There, in the depths of sleep, is the communion of the living and the dead.
GENNADY AYGI
Veronica's Book
I don't know if you've ever felt like that. That you wanted to sleep for a thousand years. Or just not exist. Or just not be aware that you do exist. Or something like that. I think wanting that is very morbid, but I want it when I get like this. That's why I'm trying not to think. I just want it all to stop spinning.
STEPHEN CHBOSKY
The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.
AUDREY NIFFENEGGER
The Time Traveler's Wife
Sleep in heavenly peace.
JOSEPH MOHR
"Silent Night"
Sleep of seven lights upon you
Sleep of seven joys
Sleep of seven slumbers on you
In your easy poise
You are home this night
Home of stillness
Your home of spirit
Being and bliss
DONOVAN
"Sleep"
I go to bed, and I wait for sleep as a man might wait for the executioner. I wait for its coming with dread, and my heart beats and my legs tremble, while my whole body shivers beneath the warmth of the bedclothes, until the moment when I suddenly fall asleep, as a man throws himself into a pool of stagnant water in order to drown. I do not feel this perfidious sleep coming over me as I used to, but a sleep which is close to me and watching me, which is going to seize me by the head, to close my eyes and annihilate me.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
"The Horla"
Sleep is so like death, I dare not trust it without my prayers.
THOMAS BROWNE
Religio Medici
As you make your bed, so you will sleep.
SWEDISH PROVERB
Even sleep is characteristic. How charming are children in their lovely innocence! How angel-like their blooming hue! How painful and anxious is the sleep and expression in the countenance of the guilty!
KARL WILHELM HUMBOLDT
attributed, Day's Collacon
Our sleep is like a rollercoaster going through 90 minutes of sleep cycles, starting in deep sleep and then light sleep ... going across the night. That deep sleep stage is the period where the conscious part of the brain -- the upper part of the brain -- is least activated. If you wake up and are quite confused as to what time it is, where you are, or who your friend is that just woke you up, you're likely to have woken up out of the deeper stages of sleep.
LEON LACK
"Sleep is like a rollercoaster which may contribute to waking up confused", ABC News, August 11, 2017
Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.
SAMUEL JOHNSON
The Idler, November 25, 1758
Blessed sleep, kindest minister to man,
Sure and silent distiller of the balm of rest,
Having alone the power, when naught else can,
To soothe the torn and sorrow-ridden breast.
JAMES WELDON JOHNSON
"Blessed Sleep"