Waking Up Each Day Quotes & Sayings

For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is "I didn't get enough sleep." The next one is "I don't have enough time." Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don't have enough of ... Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we're already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn't get, or didn't get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack ... This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life. — Brene Brown

According to reliable and never-named sources in the hospital, my situation was critical, then desperate, then critical but stable, then just stable, then uncertain, then (for twelve hours) improving, then uncertain again and then steadily bleaker with each passing day until everyone agreed that there was very little chance of my ever waking up. At that point I woke up, escaping the cul-de-sac into which I'd been written. — Gavin Extence

I wake up.
Immediately I have to figure out who I am. It's not just the body - opening my eyes and discovering whether the skin on my arm is light or dark, whether my hair is long or short, whether I'm fat or thin, boy or girl, scarred or smooth. The body is the easiest thing to adjust to, if you're used to waking up in a new one each morning. It's the life, the context of the body, that can be hard to grasp.
Every day I am someone else. I am myself - I know I am myself - but I am also someone else.
It has always been like this. — David Levithan

The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day - for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism - namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth. — Clark Strand

Hustle is waking up the day before you die and realising you gave it your all. — Gary Vaynerchuk

How we start our day determines how we create our life. Are you snoozing through your morning ... snoozing through your life ... and snoozing through your unlimited potential ... Or are YOU committed to waking up each day with passion, purpose, and a plan so you can create the life you truly want & deserve? — Hal Elrod

Waking up early on Saturday gives me an edge in finishing my work with a very relaxed state of mind. There is a feeling of time pressure on weekdays that aren't there on weekends. If I wake up early in the morning before anybody else, I can plan the day or at least my activities with relaxed mind. — Oprah Winfrey

The sun was up, the neighborhood waking. I wiped my face clean with the back of my sleeve, the warming air soft on my wet cheeks. A prayer welled up within me, a new kind of prayer. I was done begging God to forgive me for being too bitter, too needy, too egotistical, too tired. Repenting one day for being too much, the next for not being enough.

Now I clearly understood my real offence against heaven: the stubborn refusal that every failing that I had - from the first - had been forgiven. — Bethany Pierce

As for Lucile, her first awareness of the world each morning was the sensation of being made love to, and she would find herself drifting into consciousness with a mixture of surprise, pleasure, and a vague anger at this half-rape, which deprived her of all of her traditional rituals of waking up - opening her eyes, closing them again, rejecting the new day or else welcoming it - all the confused and deliciously private little conflicts in her — Francoise Sagan

Gilly had decided that this was a dream. The Witches' Carnival didn't exist in the real world. And the Gilly who existed in the real world was not brave or cunning enough to have done everything that she'd done in the past day. The real Gilly was not beautiful enough to be lying in bed beside a woman like Maggie. Gilly had decided this was a dream, and also that she'd let that real Gilly, deep asleep somewhere in the outskirts of Birmingham, wither away and never wake up.
Already, Gilly could see herself arcing across the earth bright as a comet, moving too fast for the Ashleys and Tracyes, the thousand tiny insults and humiliations of the waking world, to ever catch. — Kristopher Reisz

I like smoking at home. I like it to be one of the last things I do that day. I don't wake and bake at all; I couldn't do that. If I'm waking and baking, then I'm staying inside my place the rest of the day. I can't start my day off high. — Hannibal Buress

Sometimes life isn't about the end. It's not always about tomorrow and the day after that-what we achieve over the years and how we leave the world. Sometimes it's about today ... Any of us could die tomorrow regardless of the horde. We could get sick or be injured or anything else. That's the risk we take waking up each morning and stepping outside. — Carrie Ryan

Things we had, like respect and trust, but also freely expressed desires and accountability to whatever degree it took to make both people happy. It took work, a willingness to fight passionately and fairly--out of bed, not just in it--commitment and honesty. It took waking up and saying each day, "I hold this man sacred and always will. He's my sun, moon, and stars."
It took letting the other person in; a thing I'd stopped doing. It took being unafraid to ask for what you wanted, to put yourself on the line, to risk it all for love. — Karen Marie Moning

This was truly to be a radical milestone: the world's first-ever marathon nude psychotherapy session for criminal psychopaths. Elliott's raw, naked, LSD-fueled sessions lasted for epic eleven day stretches. The psychopaths spent every waking moment journeying to their darkest corners in an attempt to get better. There were no distractions - no television, no clothes, no clocks, no calendars, only a perpetual discussion (at least one hundred hours every week) of their feelings. When they got hungry, they sucked food through straws that protruded through the walls. As during Paul Bindrim's own nude psychotherapy sessions, the patients were encouraged to go to their rawest emotional places by screaming and clawing at the walls and confessing fantasies of forbidden sexual longing for one another ... — Jon Ronson

The magic of each day lives in the unknown. It's waking up as one person, and accepting that when night falls, we may be someone else entirely. So, when you ask what my story is, forgive me----I'm not quite sure yet. — J. Raymond

I'd simplified and objectified our relationship into one of lust and boundaries, and while both were necessary for a good relationship, it took a lot more than that to make it an epic one. Things we had, like respect and trust, but also freely expressed desires and accountability to whatever degree it took to make both people happy. It took work, a willingness to fight passionately and fairly - out of bed, not just in it - commitment and honesty. It took waking up and saying each day, I hold this man sacred and always will. He's my sun, moon, and stars. It took letting the other person in; a thing I'd stopped doing. It took being unafraid to ask for what you wanted, to put yourself on the line, to risk it all for love. We — Karen Marie Moning

Waking up every day and loving someone who may or may not love us back, whose safety we can't ensure, who may stay in our lives or may leave without a moment's notice, who may be loyal to the day they die or betray us tomorrow - that's vulnerability. Love is uncertain. — Brene Brown

A dream is the meeting of minds; an event in our waking consciousness is the coming together of sensible substances. Hence our feelings by day and our dreams by night are the meetings of mind with mind and of substance with substance. — Lie Yukou

So many fear death - spending their precious waking hours discussing it - while failing to notice that deep sleep is no different. It's as if they don't hear Mother Nature telling them not to worry every day. — Anthony Marais

I don't like waking up. I feel like staying in bed usually, but I can't because I've got two kids standing next to my bed, just eager to live another day. — Louis C.K.

in this waking time his presence, once so solid, lacked any substance or form; it was merely a shadow at the edge of every moment of the day and night. — Colm Toibin

I am always alone, pretending to be someone else or lost in a vast emptiness. I miss life. I miss conversation and laughter and shared joy and hurt. I miss dancing and painting. I miss waking up to a day with no evil in it - at least, none that I can see. — Stacey Jay

I don't know when I fell in love with you, but I have fallen deeper and harder than anyone else in my life. You've become my world. I can't imagine a day without you by my side, an hour without your smile, a minute without hearing you laugh, and a second without you in my life. She opened her mouth, and I shook my head. I will spend my life protecting you and being worthy of being yours, I've never wanted anything as badly as I want you to be mine, walking through life together hand and hand, and waking up with you next to me each morning makes my life so much sweeter than I ever thought possible — Chelle Bliss

Laughter meant healing.
Healing was more than just being cured of cancer or finding the one who actually saw you for you. It was more than getting over your past, embracing your future. Healing's waking up every day when you'd rather stay in bed; healing's when you smile instead of cry; healing's when you can hold your head high, despite what demons try to pull it down. — Rachel Van Dyken

I AM come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion. Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence
whether much that is glorious
whether all that is profound
does not spring from disease of thought
from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect. They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night. In their gray visions they obtain glimpses of eternity, and thrill, in waking, to find that they have been upon the verge of the great secret. In snatches, they learn something of the wisdom which is of good, and more of the mere knowledge which is of evil. They penetrate, however, rudderless or compassless into the vast ocean of the "light ineffable", and again, like the adventures of the Nubian geographer, "agressi sunt mare tenebrarum, quid in eo esset exploraturi".
We will say then, that I am mad. — Edgar Allan Poe

I will try to be non-violent
one more day
this morning, waking the world away
in the violent day. — Muriel Rukeyser

I enjoy having breakfast in bed. I like waking up to the smell of bacon, sue me. And since I don't have a butler, I have to do it myself. So, most nights before I go to bed, I will lay six strips of bacon out on my George Foreman grill. Then I go to sleep. When I wake up, I plug in the grill. I go back to sleep again. Then I wake up to the smell of crackling bacon. It is delicious, it's good for me, it's the perfect way to start the day. — Michael Scott

There is nothing quite so depressing as waking up to face a day when you know that you are going to have to deal with a government office or bureaucrat. — Neal Boortz

I wish to be up and doing. I wish to face each day with resolution and purpose. I wish to use every waking hour to give encouragement, to bless those whose burdens are heavy, to build faith and strength of testimony. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Tereza realized, she positively enjoyed being welcome into the day by Karenin. Waking up was sheer delight for him: he always showed a naive and simple amazement at the discovery that he was back on earth; he was sincerely pleased
(..describing how Karenin, Tereza's pet dog welcomed each day) — Milan Kundera

My parents were forever making lemonade. Neither responded to problems by drinking too much, taking anti-depressants, overeating, or suggesting they were victims. In fact, I can't recall a single day my parents slept in - the way many of us might when life throws a wrench in our plans. My parents were (are in the case of my mother - my father died in 2008) unfailingly resilient people, capable of waking up each day with a positive attitude, a new resolve to make things better. Part of this was due to their personalities, but it was also because of the generation in which they were raised. — Suzanne Venker

Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up. — Walter Benjamin

And all the time we spent in this place would fade and vanish, like a dawn dream on waking that colours the day but cannot be touched or remembered. — Neil Gaiman

He was attracted to this edge of unknowing, of hope and fear, he instinctively knew that surfing it was precondition for growth and transformation. And for feeling alive. Waking up and going out into the world not knowing what each day would hold, taking life as it comes, relinquishing any illusion of control. That's fresh, that's a good morning! — Matt Padwick

Let no youth have any anxiety about the upshot of his education, whatever the line of it may be. If he keep faithfully busy each hour of the working-day, he may safely leave the result to itself. He can with perfect certainty count on waking up some fine morning to find himself one of the competent ones of his generation. — William James

I know of nothing more despicable and pathetic than a man who devotes all the hours of the waking day to the making of money for money's sake. — John D. Rockefeller

You wake up each day from the dream; but to be free, you must also wake up from the waking state. — Mooji

It's not like it's perfect at all. But it's there. The love, it's there. The respect. The day to day has to bring you ease and comfort and safety. The waking up in the morning and going to bed at night, and everything in between has to bring you that. Or else what is the point? — Daphne Zuniga

I do have a sense of fear every day going to work, but I think it's something that I like. I mean I do like the feeling of waking up on my own, having this moment of like: "Oh, f**k, I hope I can do this today!" Because it makes you realise that you're working with material or you're working with a director or you're working with a cast and they're keeping you on your toes. — Charlize Theron

There should be a better way to start a day than waking up every morning. — Stephen Hawking

If your coping mechanism to date has been to ignore your weight, don't feel badly. You're in good company. I've done my share of standing on the doctor's scale backwards, cringing as the nurse scribbled on the clipboard, anxious when the doctor came in glancing over my record. I scrutinized his face for any semblance of judgment. Whether or not I faced the scale or the doctor skipped a pep talk, it didn't change the truth and it still pervaded every hour of my waking thoughts. I knew what I needed to do and just agonizingly prolonged it. What about you?

We want our lies to be true--desperately. We think it means less work, less pain. But aren't we experiencing work and pain every day when we are obese? We don't escape it, we just reallocate it, attach it to different problems.

The sooner we face the numbers and start to deal with them, the sooner we can resolve them. — Shannon Sorrels

I'm sure that there are many Israelis who dream of waking up one day to find the Palestinians gone. And there are many Palestinians who dream of going to bed at night and waking up the next morning to find the Israelis gone. — Daniel Barenboim

Let me tell you something, missy. You young maidens now days get misty-eyed thinking about true love and the fathomless adoration you will share. It's not like that. Real love is looking at someone and knowing that you wouldn't mind waking up to their bad breath for the next century, and you are fine with them seeing you before you brush your hair and fix your face for the day. Elle — K.M. Shea

Waking up Thursday morning to another dreary day and the sense of being physically stuffed, they focused on FISH. While Charlotte interviewed the postmaster about the origin, techniques, and ingredients for his best-in-Maine lobster bakes, Nicole set off to gather recipes for glazed salmon, baked pesto haddock, and cod crusted with marjoram, a minted savory unique to Quinnipeague, and sage. — Barbara Delinsky

I sometimes think we expect too much of Christmas Day. We try to crowd into it the long arrears of kindliness and humanity of the whole year. As for me, I like to take my Christmas a little at a time, all through the year. And thus I drift along into the holidays - let them overtake me unexpectedly - waking up some find morning and suddenly saying to myself: 'Why, this is Christmas Day! — Ray Stannard Baker

I was happy in the dream; but when I woke up it was with a feeling that I was falling apart, that I was cracking up from the inside and slowly falling to pieces. My heart was jumping and grating like a cold engine that doesn't want to start. My skin was crawling, and I couldn't manage a single clear thought. It was as if all my thoughts were crushed to bits just as they began to take shape. I didn't get much done that day. — Ninni Holmqvist

Every girl dreams of waking up one day, a princess. Until that day kicks you in the face, wearing steel toed boots. — L.A. Kennedy

Walking through Harlem first thing in the morning was like being a single drop of blood inside an enormous body that was waking up. Brick and mortar, elevated train tracks, and miles of underground pipe, this city lived; day and night it thrived. — Victor LaValle

It sounded so promising. As if this would be the day. The day to ride a bike without training wheels. To make it through the afternoon without a stained blouse and a scolding. To persuade the girl next door to like me. To meet a man. To make a mint. To prosper. To love. To live fearlessly. — Anna Quindlen

Thought is uncontrollable but controllable. Thought is the pivot of life and the epitome of good or bad living. A controlled thought is a controlled life and an uncontrolled life is an uncontrolled living. Our first and last thoughts from dawn to dusk are of great essence to living a purposeful life. They form a catalyst for a progressive or retrogressive life. What do you think of most before you sleep? What do you ponder upon most upon waking up from bed? The distinctive boundaries to your purposeful day are your first and last thoughts of the day. Remember! the first and the last thoughts. — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

I wasn't in danger today," I tell him in a choked voice. "I escaped danger today." And I did... I feel like the whole day has been an electrical shock, paddles straight to my heart, bringing me out of a lifelong torpor I hadn't even known I was in. "I escaped," I repeat. — Gayle Forman

Waking is hard, and waking is glorious. We watch as you stir, then as you stumble out of your beds. We know that gratitude is the last thing on your mind. But you should be grateful. You've made it to another day. — David Levithan

Ars Poetica

To gaze at the river made of time and water
And recall that time itself is another river,
To know we cease to be, just like the river,
And that our faces pass away, just like the water.

To feel that waking is another sleep
That dreams it does not sleep and that death,
Which our flesh dreads, is that very death
Of every night, which we call sleep.

To see in the day or in the year a symbol
Of mankind's days and of his years,
To transform the outrage of the years
Into a music, a rumor and a symbol,

To see in death a sleep, and in the sunset
A sad gold, of such is Poetry
Immortal and a pauper. For Poetry
Returns like the dawn and the sunset.

At times in the afternoons a face
Looks at us from the depths of a mirror;
Art must be like that mirror
That reveals to us this face of ours. — Jorge Luis Borges

I have tried to show why I believe that the biologist is the most romantic figure on earth at the present day. At first sight he seems to be just a poor little scrubby underpaid man, groping blindly amid the mazes of the ultra-microscopic, engaging in bitter and lifelong quarrels over the nephridia of flatworms, waking perhaps one morning to find that someone whose name he has never heard has demolished by a few crucial experiments the work which he had hoped would render him immortal. — John B. S. Haldane

You think you know horror, Irnakk? Horror is looking into the eyes of the Shadowed One, knowing you are about to die ... and then being forced to live. Horror is waking each day to see every part of your body moving on its own - a shifting mass of Protodites where once was solid metal and living tissue. Horror is what is in the eyes of your partners when they look at you ... and in the cries of your enemies when your swarm engulfs them. Don't talk to me about fear, creature - I am fear!
-Zaktan — Greg Farshtey

She will take your life and all you are and all you care'st for, and she will leave you with nothing but mist and fog. She'll take your joy. And one day you'll awake and your heart and your soul will have gone. A husk you'll be, a wisp you'll be, and a thing no more than a dream on waking, or a memory of something forgotten.' 'Hollow,' whispered the third voice. 'Hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow, hollow.' 'You — Neil Gaiman

With a bound, the sun of a molten fiery red cam above the horizon, and immediately thousands of little birds sang out for joy, and a soft chorus of mysterious, glad murmurs came forth from the earth; the low whispering wind left its hiding-place among the clefts and hollows of the hills, and wandered among the rustling herbs and trees, waking the flower-buds to the life of another day. — Elizabeth Gaskell

There isn't a day I do not work at my job, or a waking moment when I do not think through a work-related problem. Even my critics cannot begrudge the long hours I put in. Our people deserve a government that works just as hard as they do. — Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

Different kinds of tired:

1. All day at the beach sleepy. Warm skin. Wet hair. Salt and sand and green-apple scented shampoo. Bed sheet tides pulling up and down stomach flips into mermaid dreams.

2. Milky tired. Early nights. Wondering if you are getting sick. Medicine light bones. Eyelids melting closed. Dizzy, dizzy, spinning into sleep.

3. Drowsy car rides. Soft radio buzz. Pillow on the window. Pulling on your seatbelt. Waking up and not knowing where you are. — Unknown

Since the night she was kidnapped she had been appraised and reappraised, each day waking upon the pan of a new scale. Know your value and you know your place in the order. To escape the boundary of the plantation was to escape the fundamental principles of your existence: impossible. It — Colson Whitehead

SONG OF DAWN
I saw the sun rise by accident.
It was a horrible sight.
Annoyed by its splendor, I sought refuge
in a moist pillow, and lay there, alone,
at the dawn of another day,
that brought me closer to another death,
pondering the vanity of my solitude,
the vanity of procrastination,
and the tiresome inevitability of waking up
again the same person.
It might still be possible to change,
but obstinately I remain the same,
hoping that others might take solace
in my consistency.
But perhaps they take no solace in it,
perhaps they too find it tedious. — John Tottenham

the waking day of a mythically vibrant people, the ancient Greeks, for instance, is in fact more akin to dream than to the day of a sober scientific thinker. If — Friedrich Nietzsche