quotations about sleep
How lovely is the heaven of this night,
How deadly still its earth. The forest brute
Has crept into his cave, and laid himself
Where sleep has made him harmless like the lamb:
The horrid snake, his venom now forgot,
Is still and innocent as the honied flower
Under his head:--and man, in whom are met
Leopard and snake--and all the gentleness
And beauty of the young lamb and the bud,
Has let his ghost out, put his thoughts aside
And lent his senses unto death himself;
Whereby the King and beggar all lie down
On straw or purple-tissue, are but bones
And air, and blood, equal to one another
And to the unborn and buried: so we go
Placing ourselves among the unconceived
And the old ghosts, wantonly, smilingly,
For sleep is fair and warm.
THOMAS LOVELL BEDDOES
"Lines"
I softly sink into the bath of sleep:
With eyelids shut, I see around me close
The mottled, violet vapors of the deep,
That wraps me in repose.
JOSIAH GILBERT HOLLAND
"Sleeping and Dreaming"
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.
KIM STANLEY ROBINSON
Icehenge
Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at their command; for there cometh the day to all, when neither the voice of the lute nor the bird shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.
EDWARD BULWER-LYTTON
attributed, The Book of Humour, Wit & Wisdom: A Manual of Table-talk
Sleep is a nightly reminder that we are beholden to our bodies, that we are our bodies, and that one day we will die. It puts us at the wrong end of the mind-body dualism that has, from Plato through Descartes, raised mind over body. It's a blow to our dignity, a reminder ... that we are (to borrow a phrase from Shakespeare) "stinkingly dependent."
GAYLE GREENE
Insomniac
Sleep soothes and arrests the fever-pulse of the soul.
ELIZA COOK
Diamond Dust
But Sleep is kindly, even in his tricks; and the poets have treated him with proper reverence. According to the ancient mythologists, he had even one of the Graces to wife.
LEIGH HUNT
The Indicator, January 12, 1820
People are typically astonished at how deeply they sleep when they put on a black-out mask of the sort airlines provide on long-haul flights. The equation here is simple: quiet eyes = quiet mind = a brain that quickly falls asleep.
RICHARD E. CYTOWIC
"Four Ways to More Restful Sleep", Psychology Today, August 24, 2017
All men, whilst they are awake, are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own.
HERACLITUS
attributed, The Spectator, September 18, 1755
Excessive proneness to sleep is a sign of decay and waste of brain.
ANONYMOUS
Harper's Magazine, October 1866
It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that yon shall drop gently to sleep. The good is to come, not past; the limbs have just been tired enough to render the remaining in one posture delightful; the labor of the day is gone. A gentle failure of the perceptions creeps over you; the spirit of consciousness disengages itself once more, and with a slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the wind seems to have a balmy lid closing over it, like the eye--it is closed--the mysterious spirit has gone to take its airy rounds.
LEIGH HUNT
The Indicator, January 12, 1820
There surely is some Life beyond
The state of man's mere waking mind:
Whereto -- Earth-blind --
Men's spirits creep
From out the sepulchre of sleep.
WILLIAM BATCHELDER GREENE
"The Existence Dual", Cloudrifts at Twilight
Thou silent power, whose welcome sway
Charms every anxious thought away;
In whose divine oblivion drown'd,
Sore pain and weary toil grow mild,
Love is with kinder looks beguiled,
And Grief forgets her fondly cherish'd wound;
Oh, whither hast thou flown, indulgent god?
God of kind shadows and of healing dews,
Whom dost thou touch with thy Lethæan rod?
Around whose temples now thy opiate airs diffuse?
MARK AKENSIDE
"To Sleep"
Thus we travel from sleep to sleep, learning again to dream.
NICO SLATE
Where Nothing Needs To Be Said
Sleep, delicious and profound, the very counterfeit of death.
HOMER
The Odyssey
Welcome is sleep, more welcome the sleep of stone
Whilst crime and shame continue in the land;
My happy fortune, not to see or hear;
Waken me not--in mercy, whisper low.
MICHELANGELO
Walks in Florence
I've heard some studies have suggested that sleep isn't needed as much when we get older. I find that hard to believe. Sleep is as vital as coffee in the morning. Sleep is needed as much as breathing. Sleep is what I crave and -- if it's not 8 hours or close to it -- there's a chance I will really be grouchy the next morning.
ROGER BLUHM
"Sleep is needed more than ever", Dodge City Daily Globe, August 24, 2017
Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.
HERACLITUS
Fragments
Sweet is the oblivion of sleep;
But sweeter far is the sleep beyond oblivion.
ELSA BARKER
Songs of a Vagrom Angel
There are hours claimed by Sleep, but refused to him. None the less are they his by some state within the mind, which answers rhythmically and punctually to that claim. Awake and at work, without drowsiness, without languor, and without gloom, the night mind of man is yet not his day mind; he has night-powers of feeling which are at their highest in dreams, but are night's as well as sleep's. The powers of the mind in dreams, which are inexplicable, are not altogether baffled because the mind is awake; it is the hour of their return as it is the hour of a tide's, and they do return. In sleep they have their free way. Night then has nothing to hamper her influence, and she draws the emotion, the senses, and the nerves of the sleeper. She urges him upon those extremities of anger and love, contempt and terror to which not only can no event of the real day persuade him, but for which, awake, he has perhaps not even the capacity. This increase of capacity, which is the dream's, is punctual to the night, even though sleep and the dream be kept at arm's length.
ALICE MEYNELL
"The Hours of Sleep", The Spirit of Place and Other Essays