Washington Irving on sleep

Whenever a man’s friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old.

There rise authors now and then, who seem proof against the mutability of language, because they have rooted themselves in the unchanging principles of human nature.

There is a certain relief in change, even though it be from bad to worse! As I have often found in travelling in a stagecoach, that it is often a comfort to shift one’s position, and be bruised in a new place.

When I woke up this morning my girlfriend asked me, ‘Did you sleep well?’ I said ‘No, I made a few mistakes.’

Steven Wrightborn 1955

• Steven Wright

It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterward.

Baltasar Gracián1601–1658

A few hours of mountain climbing turn a villain and a saint into two rather equal creature. Exhaustion is the shortest way to equality and fraternity, and liberty is added eventually by sleep.

Friedrich Nietzsche1844–1900