Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Sleep

How sweet, though lifeless, yet with life to lie; and without dying, oh, how sweet to die!

He giveth His beloved sleep.

Night’s sepulchre.

Heaven trims our lamps while we sleep.

Tired nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep!

Sleep and Death are brothers.

Sleep in peace, and wake in joy.

Downy sleep, death’s counterfeit.

Sleep, the antechamber of the grave.

Our foster-nurse of nature is repose.

Sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow’s eye.

Sweet nurse of nature, over the senses creep.

Voluptuous as the first approach of sleep.

Sleep, thou most gentle of the deities.

Inviting sleep and soft forgetfulness.

I let fall the windows of mine eyes.

Thou driftest gently down the tides of sleep.

After life’s fitful fever he sleeps well.

At my feet the city slumbered.

The mystery of folded sleep.

He sleeps well who is not conscious that he sleeps ill.

The soul shares not the body’s rest.

Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber.

Fatigue is the best pillow.

Be sure they sleep not whom God needs.

No; death is not an eternal sleep.

How many sleep who keep the world awake!

Sleep is the best cure for waking troubles.

The world of sleep has an existence of its own.

Sleepless themselves to give their readers sleep.

The timely dew of sleep, now falling with soft slumbrous weight, inclines our eyelids.

The drowsy frightened steeds that draw the litter of close-curtained sleep.

Sleep, riches, and health are only truly enjoyed after they have been interrupted.

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to sleep.

O sleep, why dost thou leave me? why thy visionary joy remove?

Weariness can snore upon the flint, when restive sloth finds the down pillow hard.

Sleep is a generous thief; he gives to vigor what he takes from time.

God gives sleep to the bad, in order that the good may be undisturbed.

One hour’s sleep before midnight is worth two after.

Sweet sleep fell upon his eyelids, unwakeful, most pleasant, the nearest like death.

Deep rest, and sweet, most like indeed to death’s own quietness.

A holy thing is sleep, on the worn spirit shed, and eyes that wake to weep.

Sleep, to the homeless thou art home; the friendless find in thee a friend.

Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Great eaters and great sleepers are incapable of anything else that is great.

Macbeth does murder sleep, the innocent sleep.

No one but an adventurous traveler can know the luxury of sleep.

Near the Cimmerians, in his dark abode, deep in a cavern dwells the drowsy god.

Sleep is pain’s easiest salve, and doth fulfill all offices of death, except to kill.

The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, the poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release.

All sense of hearing and of sight enfold in the serene delight and quietude of sleep.

Life’s nurse, sent from heaven to create us anew day by day.

Winding up days with toil and nights with sleep.

Sleep is death’s younger brother, and so like him, that I never dare trust him without my prayers.

There is one sweet lenitive at least for evils, which nature holds out; so I took it kindly at her hands, and fell asleep.

O gentle sleep! my welcome breath shall hail thee midst our mortal strife, who art the very thief of life, the very portraiture of death.

Sleep is no servant of the will; it has caprices of its own; when courted most, it lingers still; when most pursued, ’tis swiftly gone.

Sleep hath its own world, a boundary between the things misnamed death and existence.

Well the art thou knowest in soft forgetfulness to steep the eyes which sorrow taught to watch and weep.

Balm that tames all anguish, saint that evil thoughts and aims takest away, and into souls dost creep, like to a breeze from heaven.

In a sound sleep the soul goes home to recruit her strength, which could not else endure the wear and tear of life.

Sleep is a god too proud to wait in palaces, and yet so humble too as not to scorn the meanest country cottages.

The long sleep of death closes our scars, and the short sleep of life our wounds. Sleep is the half of time which heals us.

Even sleep is characteristic. How beautiful are children in their lovely innocence! how angel-like their blooming features! and how painful and anxious is the sleep of the guilty!

Sleep, the type of death, is also, like that which it typifies, restricted to the earth. It flies from hell, and is excluded from heaven.

Put off thy cares with thy clothes; so shall thy rest strengthen thy labor; and so shall thy labor sweeten thy rest.

Sleep lingers all our lifetime about our eyes, as night hovers all day in the boughs of the fir-tree.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops; and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up to-morrow.

I never take a nap after dinner but when I have had a bad night, and then the nap takes me.

Sleep, that knits up the raveled sleave of care, the death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, chief nourisher in life’s feast.

Alike to the slave and his oppressor cometh night with sweet refreshment, and half of the life of the most wretched is gladdened by the soothings of sleep.

Sleep, gentle sleep, nature’s soft nurse, how have I frighted thee, that thou no more wilt weigh my eyelids down, and steep my senses in forgetfulness?

Canst thou, O partial sleep, give thy repose to the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude, and in the calmest and most stillest night, with all appliances and means to boot, deny it to a king?

We wake sleeping, and sleep waking. I do not see so clearly in my sleep; but as to my being awake, I never found it clear enough and free from clouds.

These should be hours for necessities, not for delights; times to repair our nature with comforting repose, and not for us to waste these times.

Leave your bed upon the first desertion of sleep; it being ill for the eyes to read lying, and worse for the mind to be idle; since the head during that laziness is commonly a cage for unclean thoughts.

In due season he betakes himself to his rest; he (the Christian) presumes not to alter the ordinance of day and night, nor dare confound, where distinctions are made by his Maker.

Let youth cherish sleep, the happiest of earthly boons, while yet it is at its command; for there cometh the day to all when “neither the voice of the lute nor the birds” shall bring back the sweet slumbers that fell on their young eyes as unbidden as the dews.

There are many ways of inducing sleep—the thinking of purling rills, or waving woods; reckoning of numbers; droppings from a wet sponge fixed over a brass pan, etc. But temperance and exercise answer much better than any of these succedaneums.

We are somewhat more than ourselves in our sleep; and the slumber of the body seems to be but the waking of the soul. It is the ligation of sense, but the liberty of reason; and our waking conceptions do not match the fancies of our sleep.

Sleep, thou repose of all things; sleep, thou gentlest of the deities; thou peace of the mind, from which care flies; who doest soothe the hearts of men wearied with the toils of the day, and refittest them for labor.

The breath of peace was fanning her glorious brow, her head was bowed a very little forward, and a tress, escaping from its bonds, fell by the side of her pure white temple, and close to her just opened lips; it hung there motionless! no breath disturbed its repose! She slept as an angel might sleep, having accomplished the mission of her God.

One-half of life is admitted by us to be passed in sleep, in which, however, it may appear otherwise, we have no perception of truth, and all our feelings are delusions; who knows but the other half of life, in which we think we are awake, is a sleep also, but in some respects different from the other, and from which we wake when we, as we call it, sleep. As a man dreams often that he is dreaming, crowding one dreamy delusion on another.

Where, in the sharp lineaments of rigid and unsightly death, is the calm beauty of slumber; telling of rest for the waking hours that are past, and gentle hopes and loves for those which are to come? Lay death and sleep down, side by side, and say who shall find the two akin. Send forth the child and childish man together, and blush for the pride that libels our own old happy state, and gives its title to an ugly and distorted image.

It is a delicious moment, certainly, that of being well nestled in bed, and feeling that you 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 slow and hushing degrees, like a mother detaching her hand from that of a sleeping child, the mind 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.

Now, blessings light on him that first invented this same sleep! it covers a man all over, thoughts and all, like a cloak; it is meat for the hungry, drink for the thirsty, heat for the cold, and cold for the hot. It is the current coin that purchases all the pleasures of the world cheap; and the balance that sets the king and the shepherd, the fool and the wise man, even. There is only one thing, which somebody once put into my head, that I dislike in sleep; it is, that it resembles death; there is very little difference between a man in his first sleep, and a man in his last sleep.

To sleep—there is a drowsy mellifluence in the very word that would almost serve to interpret its meaning—to shut up the senses and hoodwink the soul; to dismiss the world; to escape from one’s self; to be in ignorance of our own existence; to stagnate upon the earth; just breathing out the hours, not living them—“doing no mischief, only dreaming of it;” neither merry nor melancholy, something between both, and better than either. Best friend of frail humanity, and, like all other friends, it is best estimated in its loss.