Time & Perspective Quote by Charles Buxton

Time, in Buxton's view, isn't a hidden cache waiting to be discovered; it's a political resource you allocate. The sentence is built like a reprimand and a release: "never" closes the door on the fantasy that life will calm down, then "must" hands you the only workable alternative. He isn't offering productivity folklore so much as stripping away an excuse. If time can't be "found", then the people who seem to have it aren't luckier; they're more deliberate, more willing to disappoint someone, to say no, to endure the friction that comes with choosing.

The subtext is a quiet attack on Victorian gentility and modern busyness alike: the pose of being overwhelmed can function as moral cover. "I'd love to, but I can't" becomes a way to preserve one's self-image as generous and well-intentioned without paying the cost of follow-through. Buxton punctures that theater. Want time for reading, civic work, family, rest? Then you're also choosing not to do something else - and you're accepting the social consequences of that choice.

Context matters because Buxton wasn't a romantic poet; he was a public servant inside the machinery of schedules, committees, and obligations. In bureaucratic life, time is perpetually spoken for, and "urgent" is a language people use to colonize your day. His line reads like a survival principle from someone who watched responsibility expand to fill every available hour.

The rhetorical power is its bluntness: no hack, no loophole. Just agency, sharpened into a mandate.