Life & Wisdom Quote by Isidore Ducasse Lautreamont

Sleep, in Lautreamont's hands, isn't balm; it's a verdict. The line slices against the sentimental idea of rest as restoration and recasts it as social control and metaphysical coercion. "Reward" and "punishment" are already moral categories, but he makes them asymmetric: some people earn sleep, others are sentenced to it. That grim split hints at unequal interior lives. For the comfortable, sleep arrives like a wage. For the tormented, it comes like exile, an enforced shutdown when consciousness is the only arena where they can wrestle, plan, desire, or even suffer on their own terms.

Then he tightens the screws with "sanction", the most bureaucratic word in the sentence. A sanction authorizes and restricts at once; it can mean permission or penalty. Lautreamont exploits that double meaning to suggest sleep is the system's stamp on the body: you may go offline now, you must go offline now. Everyone, regardless of class or temperament, is made to submit. That "for all" is the real menace: sleep is the one institution no one opts out of.

Context matters because Lautreamont, the feverish author of Les Chants de Maldoror, writes from the pressure chamber of late-19th-century modernity, where the self is unstable and moral language feels like a trap. The sentence performs his signature move: taking a supposedly neutral biological fact and exposing the violence in the categories we use to domesticate it. Sleep becomes the nightly reminder that autonomy has limits, and that even relief can feel like surveillance.