Living is an ailment that is relieved every sixteen hours by sleep. A palliative. Death is the cure.

—Sébastien-Roch Nicolas Chamfort, c. 1790

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

—William Blake, c. 1803

What hath night to do with sleep?

—John Milton, 1637

Never greet a stranger in the night, for he may be a demon.

—Babylonian Talmud, c. 600

The law is not the same at morning and at night.

—George Herbert, c. 1633

The moon is a friend for the lonesome to talk to.

—Carl Sandburg, 1934

To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift?

—Ursula K. Le Guin, 1975

There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.

—Madame de Sévigné, 1671

The twilight is the crack between the worlds.

—Carlos Castaneda, 1968

The great difficulty lies in trying to transpose last night’s moment to a day which has no knowledge of it.

—Zora Neale Hurston, 1942

For most of us, nighttime dreaming brings us closer to our identities and our power than any activity in the waking world.

—Walter Mosley, 2000

Night affords the most convenient shade for works of darkness.

—John Taylor, 1750

After each night we are emptier: our mysteries and our griefs have leaked away into our dreams.

—E.M. Cioran, 1949

I proclaim night more truthful than the day.

—Léopold Sédar Senghor, 1956

In my dreams I sleep with everybody.

—Anaïs Nin, 1933

Our entire history is merely the history of the waking life of man; nobody has yet considered the history of his sleeping life.

—Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, c. 1780

What a man does abroad by night requires and implies more deliberate energy than what he is encouraged to do in the sunshine.

—Henry David Thoreau, 1852

By night an atheist half believes a God.

—Edward Young, c. 1745

I curse the night, yet doth from day me hide.

—William Drummond, 1616

Night is torment. That is why people go to sleep. To avoid clear sight and torment.

—Dorothy M. Richardson, 1923

Whoever thinks of going to bed before twelve o’clock is a scoundrel.

—Samuel Johnson, c. 1770

Darkness endows the small and ordinary ones among mankind with poetical power.

—Thomas Hardy, 1874

When night in her rusty dungeon has imprisoned our eyesight, and that we are shut separately in our chambers from resort, the devil keeps his audit in our sin-guilty consciences.

—Thomas Nashe, 1594

I’ve dreamed enough to have a drink.

—François Rabelais, 1546

Some nights are like honey—and some like wine—and some like wormwood.

—L.M. Montgomery, 1927

Dreams have always been my friend, full of information, full of warnings.

—Doris Lessing, 1994

The things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist.

—Ernest Hemingway, 1929

I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

—Sarah Williams, 1868

At night comes counsel to the wise.

—Menander, c. 300 BC

The day unravels what the night has woven.

—Walter Benjamin, 1929

Those who are awake have a world that is one and common, but each of those who are asleep turns aside into his own particular world.

—Heraclitus, c. 500 BC

It is not right for a ruler who has the nation in his charge, a man with so much on his mind, to sleep all night.

—Homer, c. 750 BC

Each night’s new terror drives away the terror of the night before.

—Sophocles, c. 450 BC