Sleep Quotes

Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.

Albert Camus

We are not hypocrites in our sleep.

William Hazlitt

It was sometimes said that the grey-and-black mountain range which ran like a spine north to south down that part of Faerie had once been a giant, who grew so huge and so heavy that, one day, worn out from the sheer effort of moving and living, he had stretched out on the plain and fallen into a sleep so profound that centuries passed between heartbeats.

Neil Gaiman

To be, or not to be, that is the question:Whether 'tis Nobler in the mind to sufferThe Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune,Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles,And by opposing end them: to die, to sleepNo more; and by a sleep, to say we endThe Heart-ache, and the thousand Natural shocksThat Flesh is heir to? 'Tis a consummationDevoutly to be wished. To die to sleep,To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub.

William Shakespeare

The repose of sleep refreshes only the body. It rarely sets the soul at rest. The repose of the night does not belong to us. It is not the possession of our being. Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms. In the morning we must sweep out the shadows.

Gaston Bachelard

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.

John Steinbeck

Sleeping alone, except under doctor's orders, does much harm. Children will tell you how lonely it is sleeping alone. If possible, you should always sleep with someone you love. You both recharge your mutual batteries free of charge.

Marlene Dietrich, 1962

Oh Sleep! it is a gentle thing, beloved from pole to pole, to Mary Queen the praise be given! She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven, that slid into my soul.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.

Steve Jobs

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure. So far as an overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called sleep, this is it; and yet we have a consciousness of all that is going on about us; and if we dream at such a time, words which are really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost a matter of impossibilty to separate the two. Nor is this, the most striking phenomenon, incidental to such a state. It is an undoubted fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead, yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before us, will be influenced, and materially influenced, by the of some external object: which may not have been near us when we closed our eyes: and of whose vicinity we have had no waking consciousness.

Charles Dickens

When to soft Sleep we give ourselves away,And in a dream as in a fairy barkDrift on and on through the enchanted darkTo purple daybreak--little thought we payTo that sweet bitter world we know by day.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Sonnet S

Sleep hath its own world, and a wide realm of wild reality. And dreams in their development have breath, and tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

I divide my time as follows: half the time I sleep, the other half I dream. I never dream when I sleep, for that would be a pity, for sleeping is the highest accomplishment of genius.

Soren Kierkegaard

What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

William Shakespeare

The cool kindliness of sheets, that soon smooth away trouble; and the rough male kiss of blankets.

Rupert Brooke

Come, cuddle your head on my shoulder, dear,Your head like the golden-rod,And we will go sailing away from hereTo the beautiful land of Nod.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox, The Beautif

The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.

Leonard Cohen