Wide Awake Quotes

• Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

  Carl Sagan

  Education, Atheist, Thinking

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.430, Ballantine Books

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• It takes a person who is wide awake to make his dream come true.

  Roger Babson

  Dream, Persons, Dreams Come True

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• Learning sleeps and snores in libraries, but wisdom is everywhere, wide awake, on tiptoe.

  Josh Billings

  Wisdom, Learning, Sleep

  Josh Billings (1972). “Uncle Sam's Uncle Josh: Or, Josh Billings on Practically Everything, Distilled from Josh's Rum and Tansy New England Wit by Donald Day”

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• Modern man likes to pretend that his thinking is wide-awake. But this wide-awake thinking has led us into the mazes of a nightmare in which the torture chambers are endlessly repeated in the mirrors of reason.

  Octavio Paz

  Men, Thinking, Mirrors

  Octavio Paz (1985). “The Labyrinth of Solitude: And the Other Mexico ; Return to the Labyrinth of Solitude ; Mexico and the United States ; The Philanthropic Ogre”, p.212, Grove Press

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• You know what it’s like when you’re trying to fall asleep and it only makes you more wide awake?

  Haruki Murakami

  Fall, Trying, Knows

  Haruki Murakami (1994). “The Elephant Vanishes”, Vintage

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• A man goes to knowledge as he goes to war: wide-awake, with fear, with respect, and with absolute assurance. Going to knowledge or going to war in any other manner is a mistake, and whoever makes it might never live to regret it

  Carlos Castaneda

  Spiritual, Respect, Courage

  Carlos Castaneda (2009). “The Wheel Of Time: The Shamans Of Mexico Their Thoughts About Life De”, p.15, Simon and Schuster

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• Hypocrisy in anything whatever may deceive the cleverest and most penetrating man, but the least wide-awake of children recognizes it, and is revolted by it, however ingeniously it may be disguised.

  Leo Tolstoy

  Wisdom, Children, Hypocrite

  Leo Tolstoy (2016). “Anna karenina (Arcadia Classics)”, p.334, Leo Tolstoy

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• Better try to stay wide awake, or you might end up found dead by the lake.

  Eminem

  Lakes, Found Dead, Trying

  "Song: 'Stay Wide Awake'". 2009.

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• Dear young people, Christ asks you to be wide awake and alert, to see the things in life that really matter.

  Pope Francis

  Things In Life, People, Matter

  Pope Francis “The Blessing of Family: Inspiring Words from Pope Francis”, Franciscan Media

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• Observation is so wide awake, and facts are being so rapidly added to the sum of human experience, that it appears as if the theorizer would always be in arrears, and were doomed forever to arrive at imperfect conclusion; but the power to perceive a law is equally rare in all ages of the world, and depends but little on the number of facts observed.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Science, Law, Numbers

  Henry David Thoreau, Eva Mae Burkett, Joyce S. Steward (1989). “Thoreau on writing”, Univ Pub Assoc

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• Time takes it all, whether you want it to or not. Time takes it all, time bears it away, and in the end there is only darkness. Sometimes we find others in that darkness, and sometimes we lose them there again.

  Stephen King

  Sad, Time, Loneliness

  Stephen King (2010). “The Green Mile: The Complete Serial Novel”, p.363, Simon and Schuster

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• I have these realistic dreams and snap wide awake in the middle of the night. And for a while I can't work out what's real and what isn't... That kind of feeling. Do you have any idea what I'm saying?

  Haruki Murakami

  Dream, Real, Night

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• My own eyes try to sleep, but they don't. They stay wide awake as time snarls forward and silence drops down, like measured thought.

  Markus Zusak

  Sleep, Eye, Silence

  Markus Zusak (2011). “Underdogs”, p.116, Scholastic Inc.

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• Wide awake to the presence of God, I realized I had been so focused on asking why a good God allowed bad things to happen that I was missing out on the nearness of God all along. In becoming preoccupied with the why, I was missing the who.

  Margaret Feinberg

  Asking Why, Missing, Becoming

  FaceBook post by Margaret Feinberg from Nov 25, 2012

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• We've become a nation of wolves, ruled by sheep.
  Owned by swine, overfed, and put to sleep.
  While the media elite declare what to think,
  I'll be wide awake, on the edge, and on the brink.

  Otep Shamaya

  Sleep, Thinking, Sheep

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• Better to get up late and be wide awake then, than to get up early and be asleep all day.

  Matthew Henry

  Sleep, Up Early, Get Up

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• As we gradually learn to harness the optimal computing capacity of matter, our intelligence will spread through the universe at (or exceeding) the speed of light, eventually leading to a sublime, universe wide awakening.

  Ray Kurzweil

  Light, Sublime, Awakening

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• Read poems to yourself in the middle of the night. Turn on a single lamp and read them while you're alone in an otherwise dark room or while someone else sleeps next to you. Read them when you're wide awake in the early morning, fully alert. Say them over to yourself in a place where silence reigns and the din of the culture — the constant buzzing noise that surrounds us — has momentarily stopped. These poems have come from a great distance to find you.

  Edward Hirsch

  Morning, Distance, Sleep

  Edward Hirsch (1999). “How to Read a Poem: And Fall in Love with Poetry”, p.17, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Make your initial contact short and sweet. Five sentences or less, or under 150 words. If someone instant messages you while you're online, go ahead and IM them back if you want. Otherwise, wait twenty-two to twenty-three hours between email contacts for the first few messages. Don't send messages while most people are sleeping, even if you're wide-awake. Shoot for business hours or just after dinnertime.

  Amy Webb

  Sweet, Sleep, Two

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• There are some who do not learn, and who do not improve as fast as they might, because their eyes and their hearts are not upon God; they do not reflect neither do they have that knowledge which they might have; they miss a good deal which they might receive. We have got to obtain knowledge before we obtain permanent happiness; we have got to be wide awake in the things of God.

  Lorenzo Snow

  Heart, Eye, Missing

  Lorenzo Snow (1984). “The Teachings of Lorenzo Snow: Fifth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints”, Bookcraft Pubs

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• Society is composed of slow Christians and wide-awake sinners.

  Josh Billings

  Christian, Society, Sinner

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• ...those little people, my brownies, who do one half of my work for me while I am fast asleep, and in all human likelihood do the rest for me as well, when I am wide awake and fondly suppose I do for myself.

  Robert Louis Stevenson

  People, Half, Littles

  Robert Louis Stevenson, Lloyd Osbourne, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, William Ernest Henley (1925). “The works of Robert Louis Stevenson”

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• I'm all out o faith, this is how I feel. I'm cold and I am shamed lying naked on the floor. Illusions never change into something real. I'm wide awake and I can see the perfect sky is torn. You're a little late, I'm already torn.

  Natalie Imbruglia

  Real, Lying, Sadness

  Song: Torn, Album: Left of the Middle

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• It is certainly not then-not in dreams- but when one is wide awake, at moments of robust joy and achievement, on the highest terrace of consciousness, that mortality has a chance to peer beyond its own limits, from the mast, from the past and its castle tower. And although nothing much can be seen through the mist, there is somehow the blissful feeling that one is looking in the right direction.

  Vladimir Nabokov

  Dream, Truth, Past

  Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1989). “Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited”

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• Why, he wondered, did people who had been asleep always want to make out that they were extremely wide-awake?

  Virginia Woolf

  Sleep, People, Want

  Virginia Woolf (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Virginia Woolf (Illustrated)”, p.1789, Delphi Classics

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