Life & Wisdom Quote by William Frederick Book

Time, in Book's formulation, is a quiet tyrant: it never raises its voice, it just keeps winning. "Master of his hours and days" flips the usual moral vocabulary of self-control into the language of governance. Hours and days become territory to be ruled, not weather to be endured. The punch is in the second clause: "not their servant". Servanthood implies not only busyness but obedience - an entire life organized around other people's clocks, institutional schedules, and the low-grade panic of never being caught up.

As a writer associated with the early 20th century's faith in self-management and efficiency, Book is speaking from a culture newly obsessed with measurable productivity. Industrial time - shifts, timetables, factory discipline - had trained people to treat the clock as a boss. His line is a counterspell aimed at the emerging middle-class condition: being "free" while living like a subcontractor for your own calendar.

The subtext is less about squeezing more output from a day than about reclaiming agency. "Mastery" here isn't macho dominance; it's authorship. Decide what the day is for before the day decides what you're for. That framing matters because it shifts time management from a technocratic checklist to a moral stance: if you don't set priorities, someone else will, and your life will feel like an inbox.

The quote endures because it names a modern humiliation with surgical clarity: the sensation that the hours belong to everything except you.