I'm not one of those people who is trying to act like I don't sleep. I used to be like, "Oh, I only need four hours." Now I need exactly 5 1/2 to 6 in order to feel like I've done well.
My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
Geniuses are people who dash off weird, wild, incomprehensible poems with astonishing facility, & then go & get booming drunk & sleep in the gutter. Genius elevates a man to ineffable speres [sic] far above the vulgar world, & fills his soul with a regal contempt for the gross & sordid things of earth. It is probably on account of this that people who have genius do not pay their board, as a general thing.
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired.
Strangely, nothing makes me feel tired, fatigued, at all. I've gone days and nights without sleep, and still the mind is in such a positive space it just doesn't make you feel fatigued.
Sleep is still most perfect, in spite of hygienists, when it is shared with a beloved. The warmth, the security and peace of soul, the utter comfort from the touch of the other, knits the sleep, so that it takes the body and soul completely in its healing.
Meditation means undoing what the society has done to you. It has reduced you to a machine; you have to de-automatise yourself, you have to become a man again. You have to come out of this state of unconsciousness, of mechanicalness. You have to come out of this sleep. It is possible only through meditation. There is no other way, there has never been, there will never be. The only way to reduce a man to a machine is take away his consciousness force him to function unconsciously. And just the opposite is the way of meditation: give him back his consciousness.
The reason of idleness and of crime is the deferring of our hopes. Whilst we are waiting, we beguile the time with jokes, with sleep, with eating, and with crimes.