Good Intentions Quotes

“God save us from people who mean well.”
― Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy

“Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.”
― T.S. Eliot

“I hurt myself deeply, though at the time I had no idea how deeply. I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact. That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centred, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.”
― Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

“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, Killosophy

“Manipulation, fueled with good intent, can be a blessing. But when used wickedly, it is the beginning of a magician's karmic calamity.”
― T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters with "The Divine Presence"

“Hell is paved with good intentions.”
― Samuel Johnson, The Life of Samuel Johnson LL.D. Vol 2

“But remember that good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell.”
― Neal Shusterman, Scythe

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

“Along the way, in their attempt to make their dream come true, many ultimately prefer to stay on the sideline. In the meantime, their packages of good intentions start leaking, or their letters of hope remain silenced by unawareness. ("Poste Restante")”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Burning bridges behind you is understandable. It's the bridges before us that we burn, not realizing we may need to cross, that brings regret.”
― Anthony Liccione

“If our good intentions are hinged on ignorance or figments, we remain anyhow responsible for our acts and must assume our decisions, making amends for damage. If we want to eschew awkward entanglements, we shall sharpen our perception, stay on top of what is truly going on worldwide and what our inner circles experience, and understand how they react to sensitive issues. (“The infinite Wisdom of Meditation“)”
― Erik Pevernagie

“The problem is that no matter how good your intentions, eventually you want to kill someone yourself.”
― Kenneth Cain, Emergency Sex (And Other Desperate Measures): True Stories from a War Zone

“The evil that is in the world comes out of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. One 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.”
― Albert Camus, The Plague

“A utopian system, when established by men, is likely to be synonymous with a dystopian depression. The only way for perfect peace by man is absolute control of all wrongs. Bully-cultures find this: with each and every mistake, another village idiot is shamed into nothingness and mindlessly shut down by the herd. This is a superficial peace made by force and by fear, one in which there is no freedom to breathe; and the reason it is impossible for man to maintain freedom and peace for everyone at the same time. Christ, on the other hand, transforms, instead of controls, by instilling his certain inner peace. This is the place where one realizes that only his holiness is and feels like true freedom, rather than like imprisonment, and, too, why Hell, I imagine, a magnified version of man's never-ending conflict between freedom and peace, would be the flesh's ultimate utopia - yet its ultimate regret.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“...it's true that some if the most terrible things in the works are done by people who think, genuinely think, that they're doing it for the best, especially if there is some god involved.”
― Terry Pratchett

“How many mistakes does it take before you’re bad? Does it start with a little white lie, and slowly progress to fraud . . . and worse? Does it matter if you do the wrong thing for the right reason?”
― Christina Lauren, My Favorite Half-Night Stand

“People are always meaning well,' said Edward. 'That's often the trouble.”
― Penelope Lively, Passing On

“Not everyone has good intentions. Trust no one until Discernment and Time have whetted their words and actions.”
― Reena Doss

“Don’t offend the gays and don’t inflame the homophobes. These were the twin horns on which the handling of this epidemic would be torn from the first day of the epidemic. Inspired by the best intentions, such arguments paved the road toward the destination good intentions inevitably lead.”
― Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic

“How slow the final flowering of good intentions can be, the poisonous full bloom taking place centuries beyond the scope of the original life.”
― Lauren Groff, Matrix

“It’s a sad truth that in life, the people who hurt us the most are also the people who love us the most, and that they often do so with the best of intentions.”
― Sean Norris, Heaven and Hurricanes

“No good would come of all these fine intentions.”
― Iris Murdoch, The Sacred and Profane Love Machine

“Good intentions that are not clothed in reason lead to greater disasters than those actions built on ill will or stupidity.”
― Henning Mankell, The Fifth Woman

“Good intentions are not the whole story. You must also pay attention.”
― George Hammond

“...there were no good guys, just people trying, and sometimes failing, to do the right thing. Maybe there were no bad guys either.”
― J.K. Pendragon, Junior Hero Blues

“Approach people with good intentions and love, there is nothing more precious in this world than time, good intentions, and love.”
― Santosh Kumar, Who has a heart and the mind?

“Right world is the result of right intention.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Honor He Wrote: 100 Sonnets For Humans Not Vegetables

“A good intention is like an idea that you keep to yourself. If you don’t do something with it, it’s like it never existed.”
― Frank Sonnenberg, The Path to a Meaningful Life

“In some situations, the attempts to "do something about this" can directly stress the person being targeted or make their situation worse. One example from my own experience is that people frequently screenshot and send me something horrible someone has said about me to give me a "heads-up" when I have purposefully reorganized my life to keep that stuff as far away from me as possible.”
― Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate

“World doesn't change because you mean well, world changes when you behave well.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo