Erich Fromm Quotes

All men are alike when asleep.

Sleep is such a potent, liminal state, and I don't want to drag anything in there that doesn't need to be there.

Sometimes he did not know if he slept or just thought about sleep.

Sleep is a state in which a great part of every life is passed. No animal has yet been discovered, whose existence is not varied with intervals of insensibility; and some late philosophers have extended the empire of sleep over the vegetable world.

It's really fascinating stuff, the science of sleep. We don't think of it in terms of that, but it really is.

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.

Do you ever rub your eyes and suddenly find you're awake and not asleep, as you'd grown to suspect you were?

When I sleep I sleep and do not dream because it is as well that I am what I seem when I am in my bed and dream.

Sleep seems to hammer out for me the logical conclusions of my vague days, and offer them to me as dreams.

Who knew that listening to a guy sleep could be so much deeper than sleeping with a guy.

When we are asleep, we are all equal.

When a man sleeps, he is steeped and lost in a limp toneless happiness: awake he is restless, tortured by his body and the illusion of existence. Why have men spent the centuries seeking to overcome the awakened body? Put it to sleep, that is a better way. Let it serve only to turn the sleeping soul over, to change the blood-stream and thus make possible a deeper and more refined sleep.

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.

You don't get nothing from sleep but a dream.

We term sleep a death, and yet it is waking that kills us, and destroys those spirits that are the house of life.

If we can sleep without dreaming, it is well that painful dreams are avoided. If, while we sleep, we can have any pleasing dreams, it is as the French say, tant gagne, so much added to the pleasure of life.

We sleep heavily because we need to ask so many questions as we dream alone.

Nobody knows what either sleep or waking consciousness is, even though these two have long been seen as the two sides of being: part of life's unvarying diurnal rhythm.

The English expression 'to fall asleep' is apt because the transition between waking and sleeping is a gradual drop from one state of being into another: a giving up of full self-consciousness for unconsciousness or for the altered consciousness of dreams.

I'm a very good sleeper.

Sleeping is not something I do a lot of.

It's strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we're sleeping, we're vulnerable - and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive.

People have written about 'Sleep' as if it were some kind of record attempt, but I could just put repeat marks at the end, and it would be 16 hours. It's not about that.

Sleep is perverse as human nature, Sleep is perverse as a legislature, Sleep is as forward as hives or goiters, And where it is least desired, it loiters.

Wow, you're never allowed to sleep late again. You're crankier than a fat guy in stilettos.