Of course, not everyone “battles” insomnia. Some cherish their sleepless nights. While the world is quiet, they work, live and create. But many want to sleep. They fight for their rest, especially between the hours of midnight and 3:00 a.m., thinking, “I can’t sleep.” So if you can’t fall asleep or are up early, check out these insomnia quotes. They may make you laugh, feel seen, understood and less alone—and maybe even help you get some shut-eye!
105 Best Insomnia Quotes
- “My mind decides to run when normal people sleep.” — Unknown
- “Life is something that happens when you can’t get to sleep.” — Fran Lebowitz
- “A ruffled mind makes a restless pillow.” — Charlotte Bronte
- “The worst thing in the world is to try to sleep and not to.” — F. Scott Fitzgerald
- “Your dreams may seem impossible to someone with insomnia.” — Junnita Jackson
- “Staring at the blue sky causes insomnia to occur in the human.” — Steven Magee
- “I’m an insomniac, my mind works the night shift.” — Pete Wentz
- “Insomnia is my greatest inspiration.” — Jon Stewart
- “My eyelids are heavy, but my thoughts are heavier.” — Unknown
- “You are the biggest enemy of your own sleep.” — Pawan Mishra
- “Dear Mind, please stop thinking so much at night, I need sleep.” — Unknown
- “Sleeplessness is a desert without vegetation or inhabitants.” — Jessalyn West
- “I want to sleep but my brain won’t stop talking to itself.” — Unknown
- “I prefer insomnia to anesthesia.” — Antonio Tabucchi
- “Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.” — Clifton Fadiman
- “Only the insomniac looks on with open eyes, like a cadaver who forgot to die.” — Gyula Krúdy
- “The best cure for insomnia is a Monday morning.” — Unknown
- “Sleep is such a luxury, which I can’t afford.” — Robin Sikarwar
- “The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep.” — W. C. Fields
- “Nothing cures insomnia like the realization that it’s time to get up.” — Unknown
- “Not being able to sleep is terrible. You have the misery of having partied all night… without the satisfaction.” — Lynn Johnston
- “My day starts backwards … I wake up tired and go to bed wide awake.” — Unknown
- “Error 404 sleep not found.” — Unknown
- “His insomnia was so bad; he couldn’t sleep during office hours.” — Arthur Baer
- “The scary thing about having insomnia is not the hours lost for sleeping but the re-run of thoughts you’ve been trying to forget.” — Unknown
- “Sleep comes more easily than it returns.” — Victor Hugo
- “When you have insomnia, you’re never really asleep, and you’re never really awake.” — Chuck Palahniuk
- “The night is the hardest time to be alive and 4 a.m. knows all my secrets.” — Poppy Z. Brite
- “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
- “Don’t fight with the pillow but lay down your head and kick every worriment out of the bed.” — Edmund Vance Cooke
- “I wonder why I don’t go to bed and go to sleep. But then it would be tomorrow, so I decide that no matter how tired, no matter how incoherent I am, I can skip on hour more of sleep and live.” — Sylvia Plath 32. “Between the midnight and the morning: on a given day, that’s the hardest stretch of time to fill.”― Luis Joaquin M Katigbak
- “It is better to sleep on things beforehand than lie awake about them afterward.” —Baltasar Gracian
- “I find the nights long, for I sleep but little, and think much.”― Charles Dickens
- “Insomnia is a glamorous term for thoughts you forgot to have in the day.” — Alain de Botton
- “Due to tonight’s lack of sleep, tomorrow has been canceled.” — Unknown “I hate people who can go to sleep as soon as they close their eyes. Like, that takes me 4 hours, 600 position changes, and a sacrifice to the sleep gods.” — Unknown
- “At night, I can’t sleep. In the morning, I can’t wake up.” — Unknown
- “Nothing is louder than overthinking after midnight.” — Unknown
- “The worst things: to be in bed and sleep not, to want for one who comes not, to try to please and please not.” — Proverbs
- “It is a special kind of homelessness to be evicted from your dreams.” — Karen Russell
- “Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.” —Clifton Fadiman
- “Sleep is such a luxury, which I can’t afford.” — Unknown 43. “Brain: I can see you’re trying to sleep, can I offer a selection of your worst memories from the last 10 years?” — Unknown
- “Insomnia is only mind over mattress.” — Jane Ace
- “Sleeplessness comes when my thoughts outweigh the night.” — Terri Guillemets
- “Look on the bright side insomniacs, at least your insomnia keeps most of the spiders out of your mouth.” — Unknown
- “My mind decides to run when normal people sleep.” — Unknown
- “The night felt very long, but it ended as all nights do.” ― Laini Taylor
- “Keep calm and enjoy no sleep.” — Unknown
- “That’s the advantage of insomnia. People who go to bed early always complain that the night is too short, but for those of us who stay up all night, it can feel as long as a lifetime. You get a lot done” ― Banana Yoshimoto
- “I think insomnia is a sign that a person is interesting.” ― Avery Sawyer
- “Insomnia is just another word for chit chat with the demons during bedtime.” — Daniel Saint
- “There are twelve hours in the day, and above fifty in the night.” — Marie de Rabutin-Chantal
- “The hardest thing is to go to sleep at night, when there are so many urgent things needing to be done.” — Donald Knuth
- “The only time I have problems is when I sleep.” — Tupac Shakur
- “My eyes are open but my mind is asleep.” — Unknown
- “Sleeping is so hard when you can’t stop thinking.” ― Unknown
- “The creak of bed springs suffering under the weight of a restless man is as lonely a sound as I know.” — Patrick deWitt
- “There will be sleeping enough in the grave.” — Benjamin Franklin
- “Sleeping is so hard when you can’t stop thinking about someone.” — Unknown
- “Insomnia = 1:51 a.m. + eternity + 1:52 a.m. + eternity + 1:53 a.m. + eternity.” — Unknown
- “I think the most common cause of insomnia is simple; it’s loneliness.” — Heath Ledger.
- “The heights by great men reached and kept / Were not attained by sudden flight /But they, while their companions slept /Were toiling upward in the night.” ― Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- “Those who wake at this hour feel a lonely separation from everyone but night birds and ghost crabs, never imagining the legion of kindred souls scattered in the darkness, who stare at ceilings and pace floors and look out windows and covet and worry and mourn.” ― Kathy Hepinstall
- “All she really wanted to do was sleep, but it seemed her awareness level was operating at peak efficiency, for some reason.” ― Jason Medina
- “When the sun goes down, the insomniac dreams of having a nightmare, just to get some sleep in this too-loud world.” ― Vivian Pham
- “A night full of nightmares is way better than a sleepless one.” ― Mokokoma Mokhonoana
- “I don’t sleep /I am friends with time who passes by in front of my open eyes /The clock can go for a long time, to my surpriseI am familiar with the dark yet light blue of the sky at dawn /I lay there in my bed, waiting, wishing, for the sweet release but it doesn’t come." ― Lidia Longorio
- “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.” ― Unknown
- “My nights are for overthinking. My mornings are for oversleeping.” ― Unknown
- “I lay awake for a long time. It was like sitting in a cinema after the lights go down, waiting for the previews to begin. But nothing was happening.” ― Ottessa Moshfegh
- “‘Insomnia is different,’ I said. It was hard to explain this to people. ‘You know the light that comes on when you open the refrigerator door? Just imagine it stays on all the time, even after you close the door. That’s what it’s like in my head. The light stays on.” ― Barbara Kingsolver
- “Insomnia can be a gift. More time for reading, writing and walking. More time to live.” ― Luigina Sgarr
- “My brain has too many tabs open.” — Unknown
- “Three out of four voices in my head want to sleep. The other wants to know if penguins have knees.” — Unknown
- “If you really want to mess someone up, you sleep deprive them.” ― Steven Magee
- “The fitful sleeping makes the hours pass slowly; it seems to me the night has many nights in it—has years of nights!—through which, as if through drifts of smoke, I am compelled to stumble.” ― Sarah Waters
- “On the nights I can’t sleep, like that one, like so many recently, I wish I could just turn my mind off like a lamp.” ― Iain Reid
- “Insomnia, then, is not just a state of sleeplessness, a matter of negatives. It involves the active pursuit of sleep. It is a state of longing.” ― Marina Benjamin
- “Insomnia is the act of pushing through sleep to achieve the art of insane creativity.” ― Todd Stocker
- “I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.” — Unknown
- “My life has become an endless cycle of ‘I can’t sleep’ and ‘I can’t stay awake.’” — Unknown 90.“For there is nothing quite so terror-inducing as the loss of sleep. It creates phantoms and doubts, causes one to question one’s own abilities and judgment, and, over time, dismantles, from within, the body.” ― Charlie Huston
- “His impatience for sleep often frightened that very sleep away.” ― Hugh Howey 92. “I’m awake and I can’t sleep. The more I’m awake, the more I see, and the harder to sleep.” ― Donna Lynn Hope
- “Sleep is like the tide only this time the moon doesn’t bring it in.” ― I Need You Cas
- “Hello darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with you again.” ― Paul Simon
- “Nighttime is really the best time to work. All the ideas are there to be yours because everyone else is asleep.” ― Catherine O’Hara
- “A little insomnia is not without its value in making us appreciate sleep, in throwing a ray of light upon that darkness.”― Marcel Proust
- “How do people go to sleep? I’m afraid I’ve lost the knack.” ― Dorothy Parker
- “When I feel well and in a good humor, or when I am taking a drive or walking after a good meal, or in the night when I cannot sleep, thoughts crowd into my mind as easily as you could wish.” ― Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
- “Do you know that awesome feeling when you get into bed, fall right asleep, stay asleep all night and wake up feeling refreshed? Me neither.” — Unknown 100.“I want to sleep but my brain won’t stop talking to itself.” — Unknown
- “Most people do not consider dawn to be an attractive experience—unless they are still up.” ― Ellen Goodman
- “I’m so exhausted and yet I feel like I’ll never sleep again.” ― Maya Banks
- “The loneliest thing in the world is lying awake beside someone asleep.”― Rebecca Makkai
- “I’m not an insomniac. It’s just that my mind is in the best position to catch the weight of all hovering possibilities the moment I lie down.” ― Joyce Rachelle
- “Insomnia has this romantic way of making the moon feel like perfect company.” ― Sabrina Benaim Next up, find out if weighted blankets really help with insomnia.
