Life & Wisdom Quote by William Frederick Book

Self-control is the unglamorous superpower hiding in Book's clean, almost mechanical phrasing. "Drive" flips energy from a mystical inner force into something like a vehicle or a team of horses: useful, powerful, and dangerous if it takes the reins. The sentence doesn't romanticize passion; it treats raw vigor as morally neutral, a resource that needs a driver. That's the point of the sharp contrast in the second clause: "not be driven by it". The warning isn't that energy is bad, but that undirected intensity becomes coercive, turning the self into a passenger in its own life.

Book, writing from an era steeped in self-improvement literature, industrial discipline, and the Protestant-tinged belief that character is built through management of impulse, aims at a particular kind of modern anxiety: having plenty of hustle and still feeling out of control. The subtext is anti-excuse. If you blame your temper, ambition, libido, or restlessness for what you do, you're outsourcing responsibility to your nervous system.

The line works because it's austere. No therapy-speak, no inspirational fog. It implies a hierarchy: will above appetite, purpose above mood. It also carries a social critique. In a culture that rewards visible intensity - the always-on worker, the charismatic go-getter - Book reminds you that unsteered energy isn't authenticity; it's volatility. Real agency isn't feeling a lot. It's deciding where the feeling goes.