Daily Inspiration Quote by Richard Hooker

Resignation rarely sounds this practical. Hooker, an Anglican priest writing in the aftermath of England’s religious whiplash, isn’t offering a Hallmark consolation; he’s laying down a governing principle for a church (and a country) that can’t afford purity tests. In an age when “the best things” were imagined as a single true form of worship and polity worth killing for, his sentence reframes virtue as a craft performed under constraint.

The line’s quiet force comes from its grammar. “Are not possible” shifts the problem from moral failure to reality itself: sometimes the world simply won’t yield what we think it should. Then the phrase “may be made” turns “best” into something manufactured rather than discovered. That’s a subtle theological and political move. It blesses compromise, but only as disciplined work, not as laziness or betrayal. Hooker’s Anglican via media - the middle way between Roman authority and Puritan rigor - is all over this: the ideal matters, yet the workable matters more, because the stakes are communal stability.

The subtext is pastoral but also institutional. Hooker is preparing his readers to accept a church ordered by prudence, custom, and human limits, rather than by utopian blueprint. It’s a permission slip for incrementalism: don’t burn down the imperfect in pursuit of the impossible; treat the attainable as a moral assignment. In a polarized moment, the quote reads less like surrender than like a stern defense of making peace with reality without making peace with cynicism.