Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Buxton

Buxton’s line is a Victorian rebuke disguised as practical advice: time isn’t a windfall, it’s a moral choice. “You must never find time for anything” flips the usual fantasy that the right opening will appear on its own. The verb “find” is doing quiet work here, suggesting luck, discovery, even innocence. Buxton rejects all that. Time doesn’t get found; it gets taken, carved out, defended. The second sentence tightens the screw: “If you want time you must make it.” Want becomes obligation. Desire has to graduate into discipline.

The intent is less about calendars than agency. Coming from a public servant in an era obsessed with self-improvement, duty, and industriousness, the quote reads like a pocket-sized sermon for a rapidly modernizing world. Industrial schedules were hardening daily life into shifts and timetables; “time” was becoming both currency and cudgel. Buxton’s aphorism answers the new complaint of the age - busyness - with a sharper accusation: you are not merely overwhelmed; you are choosing.

The subtext is also political in the small-p sense: priorities are values in disguise. When someone claims they “can’t find the time,” they’re often protecting something else - comfort, reputation, avoidance, or the safety of the familiar. “Make it” implies craft and construction, but also confrontation: you’ll have to disappoint someone, possibly yourself, to build the hours you claim to need. Buxton’s bluntness works because it refuses to flatter the reader’s helplessness while offering a clean, almost austere path out: act like your life is yours to schedule.