quotations about sleep
Sleep is the gift of gifts! most prized! most sweet!
The grant of mercy from offended heav'n!
The golden sceptre of the King of kings!
Nature's great fold, where, all who enter in,
The fierce, the strong, the wretched, and the vile,
Are by its mystic influence, made lambs!
C. B. LANGSTON
"What Is Sleep?"
Sleep is the gift of many spiders
The webs tie down the sleepers easy.
CARL SANDBURG
"Drowsy"
While the city sleeps
Men are dreaming
A world enlightened
Beyond this darkest age
CHICAGO
"While the City Sleeps"
Despite fifty years of research all we can conclude about the function of sleep is that it overcomes sleepiness, and that the only reliable finding from sleep deprivation experiments is that sleep loss makes us sleepy.
JAMES HORNE
Why We Sleep
Thus, sleep is a refreshing shower
To man's body, soul, and mind;
Nature's mysterious remedy
In potations, sweet and kind.
Could we ever keep on journeying
Through the bitter ills of life,
If there were no peacefulness in sleep,
No tonic to sweeten strife?
VENELIA R. CASE
Grange Poems
What means this heaviness that hangs upon me?
This lethargy that creeps through all my senses?
Nature, oppress'd and harrass'd out with care,
Sinks down to rest.
JOSEPH ADDISON
Cato
May the merciful gods, if indeed there be such, guard those hours when no power of the will, or drug that the cunning of man devises, can keep me from the chasm of sleep. Death is merciful, for there is no return therefrom, but with him who has come back out of the nethermost chambers of night, haggard and knowing, peace rests nevermore.
H. P. LOVECRAFT
"Hypnos"
Sleep, baby, sleep
Your father tends the sheep
Your mother shakes the dreamland tree
And from it fall sweet dreams for thee
NAT KING COLE
"Bedtime (Sleep Baby Sleep)"
The emptiness under sleep is all you fear,
The dead directionless winds that blow there.
HOWARD NEMEROV
"To the Memory of John Wheelwright"
That daily the night falls; that over stresses and torments, cares and sorrows the blessing of sleep unfolds, stilling and quenching them; that every anew this draught of refreshment and lethe is offered to our parching lips, ever after the battle this mildness laves our shaking limbs, that from it, purified from sweat and dust and blood, strengthened, renewed, rejuvenated, almost innocent once more, almost with pristine courage and zeal we may go forth again -- these I hold to be the benignest, the most moving of all the great facts of life.
THOMAS MANN
"Sleep, Sweet Sleep"
Care-charming Sleep, thou easer of all woes,
Brother to Death, sweetly thyself dispose.
JOHN FLETCHER
The Tragedy of Valentinian
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
THEODORE ROETHKE
"The Waking", Collected Poems
Sleep is the best meditation.
DALAI LAMA
attributed, And I Quote
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 as it pleases. 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 even if we dream, 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 impossibility to separate the two.
CHARLES DICKENS
Oliver Twist
Sleep is the salutary bath that renovates life, the entire being growing younger under its influence; it is a station in the desert of this world; and often, after dull and wearying journeys, one comes to repose in this oasis prepared by divine Providence, enabled the next day to pursue the route with renewed courage and activity.
ANONYMOUS
"Early Rising", Catholic World, vol. 5
Waking is strife; sleep is the truce of God!
HENRY VAN DYKE
"The House of Rimmon"
Sleep is not a waste of time. During sleep, a variety of biological processes take place that restore our bodies and minds.
NANCY FOLDVARY-SCHAEFER
Getting a Good Night's Sleep
Sleep is God. Go worship.
JIM BUTCHER
Death Masks
Sleep brings dreams; and dreams are often most vivid and fantastical, before we have yet been wholly lost in slumber.
ROBERT MONTGOMERY BIRD
Calavar; or, The Knight of the Conquest
While the city sleeps
Men are scheming
New ways to kill us
And tell us dirty lies
CHICAGO
"While the City Sleeps"