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We figured that the most famous quotes about sleep would hone in on themes like rest, relaxation, and our dreams. And we weren't disappointed! Consider these gems that will inspire you to get your best night's sleep, or even just to think of sleep in whole new ways.
Sleep can be an odd reality. It's a place where our brains enact plays each night, where our bodies and thoughts are renewed...where we remember where we put the keys. When sleep alters our consciousness, amazing things can happen.
We've collected all our favorite sleep quotes, from inspirational sleep quotes to quotes to help you put your mind to rest and close your eyes to sweeter dreams. So if you're awake right now wondering where you set the keys, consider some of these gems that help celebrate the very strange, and yet very mundane, phenomenon of sleep.
Sleep Quotes about the Joy of Sleep
“The joy of sleep is significant and often overlooked. It’s the keystone to our well-being during the day and at night.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“Happiness is waking up, looking at the clock, and finding that you still have two hours left to sleep.” Charles M. Schulz
"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more.” Wilson Mizener
“Sleeping is not time-wasting.” Mike Wilson
“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.” Audrey Niffenegger
“I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I’m awake, you know?” Ernest Hemingway
“Each night, when I go to sleep, I die. And the next morning, when I wake up, I’m reborn.” Mahatma Gandhi
“To sleep is an act of faith.” Barbara G. Harrison
“May sleep envelop you as a bed sheet floating gently down, tickling your skin and removing every worry.” Jeb Dickerson
“There is no sunrise so beautiful that it is worth waking me up to see it.” Mindy Kaling
“There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled.” Edward Lucas
“Oh bed! Oh bed! Delicious bed: That heaven upon earth to the weary head.” Thomas Hood
“Come, then, I woo thee, sacred sleep! Vain troubles of the world, farewell!” George Crabbe
The Power of Napping
“When we sleep well, we rise with the power to move mountains, and napping is no exception. Napping clarifies our minds. We’re more alert. We think faster. We lower our stress. Napping is food for the brain.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“I count it as a certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.” Tom Hodgkinson
"A nap can offer a glimpse into a twilight nether world where gods play and dreams happen.” Tom Hodgkinson
“I don’t feel old. I don’t feel anything till noon. That’s when it’s time for my nap.” Bob Hope
"It's not a nap, it's a much-needed life pause. Preferably with a soft blanket." Jennifer L. Betts
“A day without a nap is like a cupcake without frosting.” Terri Guillemets
“No day is so bad it can’t be fixed with a nap.” Carrie Snow
"Anybody working in a job that doesn't let you take a nap when you need to should get a new job." Becky Chambers
Sleep Secrets for Truly Restorative Sleep
“We’re conditioned to see comfort as something extra, but comfort is a requirement for being our best selves. To sleep well, envelope yourself in comfort without apology.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“Finish each day before you begin the next, and interpose a solid wall of sleep between the two.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
“A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” Charlotte Bronte
“Don’t fight with the pillow, but lay down your head, and kick every worriment out of the bed.” Edmund Vance Cooke
“Sleep deprivation is an illegal torture method outlawed by the Geneva Convention and international courts, but most of us do it to ourselves.” Ryan Hurd
"Man should forget his anger before he lies down to sleep." Mahatma Gandhi
“Oh, sleep, oh gentle sleep, nature’s soft nurse! How have I frighted thee, that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, and steep my sense in forgetfulness? William Shakespeare
“The reasons we can’t sleep at night are usually the same reasons we don’t truly live during the day.” Michael Xavier
Practical Tips on Getting to Sleep
“Sleep isn’t one thing. It’s whole-body rest and relaxation. From bedding to bedroom, diet, and soul, you sleep best when you are aligned with restfulness from all directions.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“Sharing a bed with anyone – a partner, a child, a sibling, or an animal – can be a mix of comfort and sleep disruption." Dr. Andrew Weil
“Before you sleep, read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering.” Erasmus
"I think it is good that books still exist, but they do make me sleepy.” Frank Zappa
“For sleep, one needs endless depths of blackness to sink into; daylight is too shallow, it will not cover one.” Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Quotes About Worry, Insomnia, and the Things that Keep Us Awake
“Worries about not sleeping are counter-productive. They often make it even harder to sleep and create self-fulfilling prophesies that keep us awake worrying.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“As a well spent day brings happy sleep, so life well used brings happy death.” Leonardo da Vinci
"With insomnia, nothing's real. Everything's far away. Everything's a copy of a copy of a copy." Chuck Palahniuk
“Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.” Fran Lebowitz
“Many things – such as loving, going to sleep, or behaving unaffectedly – are done worst when we try hardest to do them.” C.S. Lewis
"Sleep is for those people who are broke. I don't sleep." Terence Winter
“Sleep is the most innocent creature there is and a sleepless man the most guilty.” Franz Kafka
“If you can’t sleep, then get up and do something instead of lying there worrying. It’s the worry that gets you, not the lack of sleep.” Dale Carnegie
“The last refuge of the insomniac is a sense of superiority to the sleeping world.” Leonard Cohen
“If a man had as many ideas during the day as he does when he has insomnia, he’d make a fortune.” Griff Niblack
“Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.” Alain de Botton
Quotes on the Benefits of Sleep
"Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world.” Heraclitus
“The way to a more productive, more inspired, more joyful life is getting enough sleep.” Arianna Huffington
“We need time to defuse, to contemplate. Just as in sleep our brains relax and give us dreams, so at some time in the day we need to disconnect, reconnect, and look around us.” Laurie Colwin
“The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night’s sleep.” E. Joseph Cossman
“Sleep is the best meditation.” Dalai Lama
“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
“Sorrow can be alleviated by good sleep." Thomas Aquinas
“A good night’s sleep is always the best way to wake up and go to work.” Chanel Iman
“When you cannot sleep, you cannot get yourself out of the ditch—there’s not a chance.” Elizabeth Gilbert
Romantic Sleep Quotes
“Your dreaming self is very much like your spouse. You return to their world every night, giving them what they need, and asking them to replenish you.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
I can’t close my eyes without you in my dreams.” Luke Bryan
“Sleep is not on good terms with broken hearts. It will have nothing to do with them.” Christopher Pike
“And I start sleeping and dreaming and I think I’ll dream about you all through the night.” John Mayer
“If tonight my soul may find her peace in sleep, and sink in good oblivion, and in the morning wake like a new opened flower then I have been dipped again in God, and new created.” D.H. Lawrence
"Now I see the secret of making the best person: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth." Walt Whitman
“Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.” Audrey Niffenegger
“I love you, in that place between coffee and sleep.” Atticus
When We Don't Sleep Enough
“The modern world is full of distractions and worries. We can easily sacrifice our rest thinking we’re doing the real work of solving our problems and getting ahead. But it backfires. Without sleep, we’re creating more problems than we’re solving.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
″The Rusty Old Engine sighed: ‘I am so tired. I must rest my weary wheels. I cannot pull even so little a train as yours over the mountain. I can not. I can not. I can not.’” Watty Piper
"I need some sleep. It can't go on like this. I tried counting sheep. But there's one I always miss." Eels
“Without enough sleep, we all become tall two-year-olds.” JoJo Jensen
“His mind tired — tired with nothing, tired with everything, with the world’s weight he had never chosen to bear.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Oh, I’m so tired, so tired of it all, of myself, of lying and thinking up lies, and not knowing what is a lie and what is the truth.” Dashiell Hammett
Quotes About Sleep Health
“Sleep is the heart of wellness. So when we don’t sleep enough, we sacrifice our health. We don’t think as well, perform as well. There’s this potential self that we have that only emerges when we’re well rested and that person is our best self.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
"Simple breathing techniques...can help people take their attention away from their thoughts onto something else. I like to tell people that the literal meaning of conspiracy is to breathe together. So, we have just been engaged in a conspiracy, I hope for better health and better wellness.” Dr. Andrew Weil
“Fatigue is the best pillow.” Benjamin Franklin
“Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together.” Thomas Dekker
“The shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. The leading causes of disease and death in developed nations—diseases that are crippling health-care systems, such as heart disease, obesity, dementia, diabetes, and cancer—all have recognized causal links to a lack of sleep.” Dr. Matthew Walker
“The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.” F. Scott Fitzgerald
“Even thus last night, and two nights more I lay, and could not win thee, sleep, by any stealth. So do not let me wear tonight away. Without thee what is all the morning’s wealth? Come, blessed barrier between day and day, dear mother of fresh thoughts and joyous health!” William Wordsworth
"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Benjamin Franklin
“Sleep might be the most important aspect of building a great business, and having a high-performing body.” Lewis Howes
Dreams and Inspirations
“Dreaming is a powerful force for manifesting. It helps us create the waking lives we desire to see them in our dreams.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.” William Shakespeare
"You know I dream in color, And do the things I want." Kelly Clarkson
“I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?” John Lennon
"I don't sleep, I just dream." Christopher Nolan
“The nicest thing for me is sleep. Then at least I can dream.” Marilyn Monroe
“I walked with you, once upon a dream.” Charles Perrault
“I don't paint dreams or nightmares, I paint my own reality.” Frida Kahlo
“Your future depends on your dreams, so go to sleep.” Mesut Barazany
Sleep Terrors and Nightmares
“We all wish we could make a nighttime oasis that keeps out nightmares, but our worries show through in our sleep.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
"I very often have night terrors. Just think of the worst possible situation, and it's a regular thing for me. I've died in my sleep twenty-three different ways." Julian Casablancas
“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.” Bram Stoker
"I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long." Joseph Heller
“Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.” Ransom Riggs
"We think is happening in the brain, the way I like to think about it is, it's almost like, you're brain is going through all these stages of sleep and it's developing in children so fast that it's almost like you're shifting gears in a car. And at some point, you actually stall out a little bit, and that's kind of what happens during a night terror." Shelby Harris
"He was a good landlord. When my heater stopped working in mid-December, it took him only two weeks to get it fixed. Of course, it took me knocking on his door in need of a warm place to sleep to get it that way, but one night on his sofa, where I’d suddenly developed night terrors and epilepsy, and that puppy was running like a Mercedes the next day. It was awesome." Darynda Jones
“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.” Mark Z. Danielewski
Funny Sleep Quotes
“If you’re having trouble sleeping, think of yourself like Thomas Edison. You haven’t failed. You’ve just found 10,000 things that don’t work. Keep trying. Everyone has a unique combination.” Sarah Bergman, Purecare
“I love to sleep. Do you? Isn’t it great? It really is the best of both worlds. You get to be alive and unconscious.” Rita Rudner
“Early to rise, early to bed, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and dead.” James Thurber
“I think sleeping was my problem in school. If school had started at four in the afternoon, I’d be a college graduate today.” George Foreman
"The best part of waking up is going back to sleep." Coffee commercial
“No wonder Sleeping Beauty looked so good…she took long naps, never got old, and didn’t have to do anything but snore to get her Prince Charming.” Olive Green
“If you’re going to do something tonight that you’ll be sorry for tomorrow morning, sleep late.” Henny Youngman
