World Sleep Day: Top 10 quotes on sleep
World Sleep Day is celebrated to spread awareness about the important relationship between sleep and good health Getty Images

A good night's sleep is perhaps one of the most important and (in my case) the most elusive aspect of everyday lives. World Sleep Day is an annual event organised by the World Association of Sleep Medicine since 2008 to spread awareness about the importance of sleep and its deep bond with good health. It is celebrated on the Friday of the second full week of March and this year it falls on 18 March.

Among the most common complaints of the young and the old in this generation is the inability to fall asleep and/or sleep well.

An alarmingly increasing number of people in today's tech-advanced society are falling victim to sleep-related disorders like narcolepsy, sleep paralysis and fatal familial insomnia (FFI) — a rare disease which affects the brain such that a patient's lifespan after the onset of symptoms is reduced to a mere 18 months.

In celebration of perhaps one of the most vital commemorative days, IBTimes UK has compiled a list of quotes on the human body's most essential, wonderful and sometimes elusive function — sleep.

  • "I love sleep. My life has the tendency to fall apart when I'm awake, you know?" — Ernest Hemingway (American novelist and journalist)
  • "Sleep is that golden chain that ties health and our bodies together" — Thomas Dekker (Elizabethan dramatist and writer)
  • "Sleep is the best meditation." — The Dalai Lama (Buddhist monk and guru)
  • "The nicest thing for me is sleep, then at least I can dream." — Marilyn Monroe (American actress and model)
  • "Laugh and the world laughs with you, snore and you sleep alone." — Anthony Burgess (English writer and composer)
  • "Sleep, those little slices of death — how I loath them." — Edgar Allen Poe (American writer and literary critic)
  • "There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep." — Homer, The Odyssey (Ancient Greek philosopher, poet and writer)
  • "Life is something that happens when you can't get to sleep." — Fran Lebowitz (American author and public speaker)
  • "Indolence is the sleep of the mind." — Luc de Clapiers (18<sup>th Century writer and moralist)
  • "Death, so called, is a thing that makes men weep, and yet a third of life is passed in sleep." — Lord Byron (English poet and herald of the Romantic movement)
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