Time is so old and love so brief, love is pure gold and time a thief. We're late, darling, we're late, The curtain descends, everything ends, too soon, too soon.
Ogden NashRead
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.
Interpretation
What this quote means
This quote reflects the contradictory nature of sleep and its presence in our lives, regardless of our desires.
Ogden Nash's quote highlights the ironic and paradoxical aspects of sleep, suggesting that it often comes at the most inconvenient times and is a fundamental part of human nature and societal constructs. It portrays sleep as an unavoidable force that looms over us, regardless of our preferences or needs, akin to the inevitable workings of government and biological processes.
Themes
SleepHuman NatureParadoxIronyPsyche
In practice
Example use cases
During a seminar about balancing work and life, this quote can illustrate the necessity of acknowledging our basic human needs.
More from Ogden Nash
All quotes →I'm like a backward berry, Unripened on the vine, For all my friends are fifty, And I'm only forty-nine.
Ogden NashRead
I do not like to get the news, because there has never been an era when so many things were going so right for so many of the wrong persons.
Ogden NashRead
Here's a good rule of thumb; too clever is dumb.
Ogden NashRead
Middle-age is when you're sitting at home on a Saturday night and the telephone rings and you hope it isn't for you.
Ogden NashRead
Here's a toast to the roast that good fellowship lends, with the sparkle of beer and wine; May its sentiment always be deeper, my friends, than the foam at the top of the stein. Then here's to the heartening wassail, wherever good fellows are found; Be its master instead of its vassal, and order the glasses around.
Ogden NashRead
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I am convinced that the deepest desire within each of us is to be liberated from the controlling influences of our own psychic madness or patterns of fear. All other things—the disdain of ordinary life, the need to control others rather than be controlled, the craving for material goods as a means of security and protection against the winds of chaos—are external props that serve as substitutes for the real battle, which is the one waged within the individual soul.
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Be careless in your dress if you must, but keep a tidy soul.
Mark TwainRead
In nature a repulsive caterpillar turns into a lovely butterfly. But with human beings it is the other way round: a lovely butterfly turns into a repulsive caterpillar.
Anton ChekhovRead
Life - the way it really is - is a battle not between Bad and Good but between Bad and Worse.
Joseph BrodskyRead
The instability of our laws is really an immense evil. I think it would be well to provide in our constitutions that there shall always be a twelve-month between the ingross-ing a bill & passing it: that it should then be offered to its passage without changing a word: and that if circum-stances should be thought to require a speedier passage, it should take two thirds of both houses instead of a bare majority.
Thomas JeffersonRead