Sleeplessness Quotes

• lonely people are always up in the middle of the night.

  Nicole Krauss

  Lonely, Night, People

  Nicole Krauss (2006). “The History of Love: A Novel”, p.148, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Sleep is like the unicorn - it is rumored to exist, but I doubt I will see any

  Dr. Seuss

  Sleep, Doubt, Unicorn

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• Care keeps his watch in every old man’s eye, And where care lodges, sleep will never lie.

  William Shakespeare

  Lying, Sleep, Eye

  William Shakespeare, George Steevens, Nicholas Rowe, Samuel Johnson (1824). “The Plays”, p.37

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• If a composer suffers from loss of sleep and his sleeplessness induces him to turn out masterpieces, what a profitable loss it is!

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Sleep, Loss, Suffering

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• Sleeping is no mean art: for its sake one must stay awake all day.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  Good Night, Dream, Art

  Friedrich Nietzsche (1977). “The Portable Nietzsche”, p.92, Penguin

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• The mind that is full of God is empty of anxiety. Are you troubled, restless, sleepless? Then think of God more!

  Max Lucado

  Thinking, Anxiety, Mind

  Twitter post from May 04, 2015

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• Very often, gleams of light come in a few minutes' sleeplessness, in a second
  perhaps; you must fix them. To entrust them to the relaxed brain is like writing on water; there is every chance that on the morrow there will be no slightest trace left of any happening.

  Antonin Sertillanges

  Writing, Light, Water

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• Another intruder that plagues our good health is sleeplessness. Insomnia is much like constipation in that stress or nervous tension can bring it on or aggravate it until there's almost no coping with it. That's why you find sleeping pills in so many medicine cabinets next to the laxatives.

  Jack LaLanne

  Stress, Sleep, Insomnia

  Jack Lalanne (1995). “Revitalize Your Life After Fifty”, Hastings House Pub

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• Men ought to know that from the brain and from the brain only arise our pleasures, joys, laughter, and jests as well as our sorrows, pains, griefs and tears. ... It is the same thing which makes us mad or delirious, inspires us with dread and fear, whether by night or by day, brings us sleeplessness, inopportune mistakes, aimless anxieties, absent-mindedness and acts that are contrary to habit.

  Hippocrates

  Laughter, Pain, Mistake

  Hippocrates (1967). “Hippocrates”

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• Methought I heard a voice cry 'Sleep no more!
  Macbeth does murder sleep', the innocent sleep,
  Sleep that knits up the ravell'd sleeve of care,
  The death of each day's life, sore labour's bath,
  Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course,
  Chief nourisher in life's feast...

  William Shakespeare

  Hurt, Sleep, Insomnia

  'Macbeth' (1606) act 2, sc. 2, l. 36

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• You lack the season of all natures, sleep.

  William Shakespeare

  Sleep, Insomnia, Macbeth Theme

  'Macbeth' (1606) act 3, sc. 4, l. 141

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• It is rarely that the pleasures of the imagination will compensate for the pain of sleeplessness.

  Thomas Hardy

  Pain, Imagination, Pleasure

  Thomas Hardy (2016). “FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (British Classics Series): Historical Romance Novel”, p.69, e-artnow

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• Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late; the pain of the sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horror as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads; to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams.

  Bram Stoker

  Dream, Sweet, Pain

  Bram Stoker (2015). “Classic Horror Collection: Dracula, Frankenstein, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Jekyll and Hyde, & The Island of Dr. Moreau”, p.134, Xist Publishing

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• When I am with you, we stay up all night. When you're not here, I can't go to sleep. Praise God for those two insomnias! And the difference between them.

  Rumi

  Love, Spiritual, Sleep

  Rumi (2015). “Selected Poems”, p.147, Penguin UK

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• Emotionally, grief is a mixture of raw feelings such as sorrow, anguish, anger, regret, longing, fear, and deprivation. Grief may be experienced physically as exhaustion, emptiness, tension, sleeplessness, or loss of appetite.

  Judy Tatelbaum

  Regret, Grief, Loss

  Judy Tatelbaum (2009). “The Courage to Grieve: The Classic Guide to Creative Living, Recovery, and Growth Through Grief”, p.7, Harper Collins

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• I am gay on the outside, especially among my own folk (I count Poles my own); but inside something gnaws at me; some presentiment, anxiety, dreams - or sleeplessness - melancholy, indifference - desire for life, and the next instant, desire for death; some kind of sweet peace, some kind of numbness, absent-mindedness.

  Frederic Chopin

  Life, Dream, Sweet

  Frederic Chopin (2013). “Chopin's Letters”, p.166, Courier Corporation

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• Skepticism turns to cynicism, which leads to apathy and despair, which can cause sleeplessness, dry-mouth, and loss of sex drive?

  Al Franken

  Sex, Loss, Despair

  "Why Not Me?". Book by Al Franken, www.cnn.com. January 12, 1999.

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• Today's competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting, not exhilarating; is unending-a part of one's social life, one's solitude, one's sleep, one's sleeplessness.

  Louis Kronenberger

  Sleep, Competition, Solitude

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• Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.

  Jessamyn West

  Sleep, Insomnia, Desert

  Jessamyn West (1986). “Woman Said Yes: Encounters with Life and Death”, Harcourt on Demand

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• Oh love, rose made wet by mermaids and foams, fire that dances and climbs up the invisible stairs and awakens the blood in the tunnel of sleeplessness.

  Pablo Neruda

  Love, Fire, Tunnels

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• Under the strain of this continually impending doom and by the sleeplessness to which I now condemned myself, ay, even beyond what I had thought possible to man, I became, in my own person, a creature eaten up and emptied by fever, languidly weak both in body and mind, and solely occupied by one thought: the horror of my other self.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  Men, Self, Mind

  Robert Louis Stevenson (2010). “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde”, p.118, Bibliolis Books

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• Don't buy society’s definition of success. Because it’s not working for anyone. It’s not working for women, it's not working for men, it's not working for polar bears, it's not working for the cicadas that are apparently about to emerge and swarm us. It’s only truly working for those who make pharmaceuticals for stress, sleeplessness and high blood pressure.

  Arianna Huffington

  Graduation, Stress, Heart

  Arianna Huffington's Commencement Address at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, www.smith.edu. May 19, 2013.

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• It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.

  George Orwell

  Pain, Struggle, Fighting

  George Orwell, Ian Angus, Sheila Davison “The Complete Works of George Orwell: Nineteen eighty-four”

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• The capital phenomenon, the most catastrophic disaster, is uninterrupted sleeplessness, that nothingness without release.

  Emile M. Cioran

  Disaster, Release, Phenomenon

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• As a seasoned insomniac, I knew sometimes the way to beat sleeplessness was to outwit it: to pretend you didn't care about sleeping. Then sometimes sleep became piqued, like a rejected lover, and crept up to try to seduce you.

  Erica Jong

  Sleep, Trying, Bed

  Erica Jong (2013). “Fear of Flying: 40th Anniversary Edition”, p.379, Open Road Media

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