What Are Your Favorite Quotes About Sleep?

Below I've posted my own favorite quotes about sleep. I hope you enjoy them. You're invited to post your own favorite sleep quotes at the bottom of this page.

Let's be serious for a moment. As you read these clever, funny, and insightful sleep quotes, consider their larger meaning.

Appreciate the incredible fact that we spend a third of our lives unconscious in bed!

While many of these quotations are light-hearted and even mock the human condition, some are profound.

As with famous quotes in general, thinking about the the quotes, even memorizing some of them, helps us learn from the insight offered by some of the wisest men and women to have walked this planet.

Quotations that strike a chord within us, as these quotes about sleep have done for me, are in fact a distilled form of wisdom.

Restful sleep promotes health

Besides the entertainment value, pondering memorable quotes serves an important purpose as we, as individuals, learn the best ways to survive and thrive in the world.

To paraphrase the Ernest Becker, anthropologist and Pulitzer-Prize winning author, there is in our time an "overabundance of truth" which apparently cannot be consumed. These sleep quotes encapsulate some of the truths about sleep it can be advantageous to remember.

As an aid to memory, I've primarily listed on this page shorter quotes about sleep. Certainly there are longer quotations about sleep, as from poems, that are quite insightful and valuable and worth pondering, but I have not included them here.

Don't Take the Need for Sleep for Granted

Philosophical ramblings aside, quotations about sleep also remind us of the powerful and real influence a night's restful sleep, or lack thereof, can have our physical and mental health.

It is well known by science, and by people who sleep poorly, that lack of deep, restorative sleep negatively affects mental performance and memory in particular.

Sleep rejuvenates the mind

Researchers at the University of California Berkeley have even linked poor sleep to increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease later in life.

So don't take sleep for granted. Don't push yourself too hard, trying to get by on inadequate sleep.

Pay attention to your energy level and mental focus during the day. If you sense you're not performing optimally, the cause might be as simple as sleep deficit.

Sometimes a solid night's sleep is all you need to recharge. Maybe you just need more rest.

Now, without further ado, here are my favorite quotations about sleep:

1) Quotes About Sleep and the Human Condition

"All men while they are awake are in one common world: but each of them, when he is asleep, is in a world of his own."
- Plutarch

"We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep."
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest

"One of the secrets of a long and fruitful life is to forgive everybody everything every night before you go to bed."
- Bernard Baruch

"Even a soul submerged in sleep is hard at work and helps make something of the world."
- Heraclitus, Fragments

"A man can do only what he can do. But if he does that each day he can sleep at night and do it again the next day."
- Albert Schweitzer

"Sleeping people are so remote.... Right here, but out of communication. That's what strikes humans as uncanny about sleep. Its utter privacy. The sleeper turns his back on everyone."
- Ursula Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

"The best bridge between despair and hope is a good night's sleep."
- E. Joseph Cossman

"I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting."
- Avery Sawyer, Notes to Self

"A well-spent day brings happy sleep."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

"Each day is a little life: every waking and rising a little birth, every fresh morning a little youth, every going to rest and sleep a little death."
- Arthur Schopenhauer

"The feeling of sleepiness when you are not in bed, and can't get there, is the meanest feeling in the world."
- Edgar Watson Howe

"That we are not much sicker and much madder than we are is due exclusively to that most blessed and blessing of all natural graces, sleep."
- Aldous Huxley, Themes and Variations

"There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep."
- Homer

2) Quotes About Sleep and the Mind

"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

"From reading too much, and sleeping too little, his brain dried up on him and he lost his judgment."
- Miguel de Cervantes

"A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow."
- Charlotte Bronte

"To those who are awake, there is one world in common; but of those who are asleep, each is withdrawn to a private world of his own."
- Heraclitus, Fragments

"I've always envied people who sleep easily. Their brains must be cleaner, the floorboards of the skull well swept, all the little monsters closed up in a steamer trunk at the foot of the bed."
- David Benioff, City of Thieves

"O magic sleep! O comfortable bird,
That broodest o'er the troubled sea of the mind
Till it is hush'd and smooth!"
- John Keats, Endymion

"Man is a genius when he is dreaming."
- Akira Kurosawa

"Sleep is the best meditation."
- Dalai Lama

3) Funny Quotes About Sleep

"People who say they sleep like a baby usually don't have one."
- Leo J. Burke

"If people were meant to pop out of bed, we'd all sleep in toasters."
- Author unknown

"Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone."
- Anthony Burgess

"I wasn't really asleep. I was just meditating on unconsciousness."
- Paul Bourget

"The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep."
- W. C. Fields

"I'm not a very good sleeper. But you know what? I'm willing to put in a few extra hours every day to get better. That's just the kind of hard worker I am."
- Jarod Kintz, Whenever You're Gone, I'm Here For You

"I do 5 sit-ups every morning. May not sound like much, but there's only so many times you can hit the snooze button..."
- Unknown

"The amount of sleep required by the average person is five minutes more."
- Unknown

4) Quotes About Sleep and Health

"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

"There is more refreshment and stimulation in a nap, even of the briefest, than in all the alcohol ever distilled."
- Edward Lucas

"Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together."
- Thomas Dekker

"A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor's book."
- Irish Proverb

"Sleep is life's nurse, sent from heaven to create us anew day by day."
- Charles Reade, attributed, Day's Collacon

"Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise."
- Benjamin Franklin

"Eat healthily, sleep well, breathe deeply, move harmoniously."
- Jean-Pierre Barral

"Think in the morning. Act in the noon. Eat in the evening. Sleep in the night."
- William Blake

Share Your Favorite Quotes About Sleep

The sleep quotes listed above are just my favorites. But tastes and experiences differ, and I'm sure there are many other thought-provoking sleep quotes I haven't heard.

Know a great quote about sleep? Feel free to share your favorite sleep quotes with the rest of us.

Post your favorite sleep quotes in the Comments section below. You need to be signed in to Facebook, Yahoo!, AOL, or Hotmail to leave a comment on this page.

Note: If you liked these quotations about sleep, you might also enjoy the list of my favorite meditation quotes.