Quotes & Sayings About Good Intentions Gone Bad

There seems to me nothing very bad about a nation's capital having good intentions - and when the intentions are magnificent, so much the better. — Katharine Graham

We overcome the evil in the world by the charity and compassion of God, and in so doing we drive all evil out of our own hearts. The evil that is in us is more than moral. There is a psychological evil, the distortion caused by selfishness and sin. Good moral intentions are enough to correct what is formally bad in our moral acts. But in order that our charity may heal the wounds of sin in our whole soul it must reach down into the furthest depths of our humanity, cleaning out all the infection of anxiety and false guilt that spring from pride and fear, releasing the good that has been held back by suspicion and prejudice and self-conceit. Everything in our nature must find its right place in the life of charity, so that the whole man may be lifted up to God, that the entire person may be sanctified and not only the intentions of his will. — Thomas Merton

Spare me therefore, your good intentions, your inner sensitivities, your unarticulated and unexpressed love. And spare me also these tedious psycho-historians which, by exposing the goodness inside the bad man, and the evil in the good-invariably establish a vulgar and perverse egalitarianism, as if the arrangement of what is outside and what inside makes no moral difference. — Willard Gaylin

86. I get angry when believers unhesitatingly attribute every good thing in the world to God - and then respond to bad things by saying, "God works in mysterious ways." If God's ways are so mysterious, and we can't begin to understand his thinking behind tsunamis and drought and pediatric cancer, then what makes you think you understand his intentions when it comes to pretty sunsets or cute puppies or helping you find the peanut butter? — Greta Christina

Changes in Relationship with others:
It is especially hard to trust other people if you have been repeatedly abused, abandoned or betrayed as a child. Mistrust makes it very difficult to make friends, and to be able to distinguish between good and bad intentions in other people. Some parts do not seem to trust anyone, while other parts may be so vulnerable and needy that they do not pay attention to clues that perhaps a person is not trustworthy. Some parts like to be close to others or feel a desperate need to be close and taken care of, while other parts fear being close or actively dislike people. Some parts are afraid of being in relationships while others are afraid of being rejected or criticized. This naturally sets up major internal as well as relational conflicts. — Suzette Boon

My road to hell isn't paved with good intentions - or bad - it's just my road. — Rainbow Rowell

Hell is paved with good intentions, not with bad ones. All men mean well. — George Bernard Shaw

The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clearsightedness. Hence — Albert Camus

Most of the bad situations I've encountered began with the best of intentions. — John Connolly

If your intentions are good, nothing bad can happen. — Debasish Mridha

Listen, my timing might be bad, but my intentions are good. — Karyn Bosnak

Whenever we depart from voluntary cooperation and try to do good by using force, the bad moral value of force triumphs over good intentions. — Milton Friedman

She had thought once that there were good people and bad people, that there was a side of light and a side of darkness, but she no longer thought that. She had seen evil, in her brother and her father, the evil of good intentions gone wrong and the evil of sheer desire for power. But in goodness there was also no safety: Virtue could cut like a knife, and the fire of Heaven was blinding. — Cassandra Clare

The motive behind criticism often determines its validity. Those who care criticize where necessary. Those who envy criticize the moment they think that they have found a weak spot. — Criss Jami

One lives with so many bad deeds on one's conscience and some good intentions in one's heart. — John Dewey

You know how they say the path to hell is paved with good intentions? Well, maybe the path to heaven is paved with bad ones. — Jake Coburn

Nevertheless I would be a hypocrite not to anticipate that the good intentions I brought to The Prince will also be the root of some other man's evil, if only because the way to the house of the Devil is the same for the good man and the bad - and the journey just as necessary for them both. The times change, but the nature of men does not. — Michael Ennis

And I'd learned, the hard way, that sometimes, even with the purest intentions, we make things worse when we do our best to make things better. — Gregory David Roberts

Intentions, good or bad, are not enough. There's luck or fate or something else that takes over ... — John Steinbeck

Good intentions but bad results; bad results but lessons learned. There is a dark corner on every task beautiful and a beautiful corner on every task dark. — Criss Jami

Wishes cannot be summoned up or kept away at will. They come from deeper within us than good or bad intentions. And they spring up unannounced. — Michael Ende

The taxi driver felt that it was a good observation, and said he was planning to build for the future, too: he had some money on the horses, and if he won, he would buy his own taxicab, and really do well.
I felt very sorry. I told him that betting on the horses was a bad idea, but he insisted it was the only way he could do it. He had such good intentions, but his method was going to be luck.
I wasn't going to go on philosophizing, so he took me to a place where there was a steel band playing some great calypso music, and I had an enjoyable afternoon. — Richard Feynman

How can two good people both have such good intentions end up with feelings, derived from all the goodness, that are so incredibly bad? — Colleen Hoover

I see that I've become a really bad correspondent. It's not that I don't think of you. You come into my thoughts often. But when you do it appears to me that I owe you a particularly grand letter. And so you end in the "warehouse of good intentions": "Can't do it now." "Then put it on hold." This is one's strategy for coping with old age, and with death
because one can't die with so many obligations in storage. Our clever species, so fertile and resourceful in denying its weaknesses. — Saul Bellow

Of course the Catholic ethic was an ethic of intentions. But the concrete intentio of the single act determined its value. And the single good or bad action was credited to the doer determining his temporal and eternal fate. Quite realistically the Church recognized that man was not an absolutely clearly defined unity to be judged one way or the other, but that his moral life was normally subject to conflicting motives and his action contradictory. — Max Weber

If you want to do something but cannot, then before God, who knows our hearts, it is as if we have done it. This is true whether the intended action is good or bad. — St. Mark The Ascetic

I will overlook bad behavior if I know that people's intentions are good. I have this belief that people really can do good things and that people want to be good. — Elizabeth Mitchell

It constantly amazes me that defenders of the free market are expected to offer certainty and perfection while government has only to make promises and express good intentions. Many times, for instance, I've heard people say, "A free market in education is a bad idea because some child somewhere might fall through the cracks," even though in today's government school, millions of children are falling through the cracks every day. — Lawrence W. Reed

Intentions, whether good or bad, that don't reflect the words and actions are only meant to fulfill personal goals. — Ashish Patel

Bad decisions made with good intentions, are still bad decisions. — James C. Collins

Certainly,nothing proceeded according to desire.In the long run, failure was the only thing that worked predictably. All else was accidental. Good intentions had miscarried, and bad ones had not improved. — Joseph Heller

All broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else's poor decision making. — Joshua Ferris