Quotes on Good Intentions

You can talk all you want about having a clear purpose and strategy for your life, but ultimately this means nothing if you are not investing the resources you have in a way that is consistent with your strategy. In the end, a strategy is nothing but good intentions unless it's effectively implemented.

The smallest act of kindness is worth more than the greatest intention.

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.

So many financial dreams are thwarted by the failure to act upon good intentions.

Institutions mistake good intentions for objectives. They say "health care"; that's an intention, not an objective.

A good intention clothes itself with sudden power. When a god wishes to ride, any chip or pebble will bud and shoot out winged feet, and serve him for a horse.

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

A good intention but fixed and resolute - bent on high and holy ends, we shall find means to them on every side and at every moment; and even obstacles and opposition will but make us "like the fabled specter-ships," which sail the fastest in the very teeth of the wind.

Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

An institution which is financed by a budget - or which enjoys a monopoly which the customer cannot escape - is rewarded for what it deserves rather than what it earns. It is paid for 'good intentions' and 'programs'. It is paid for not alienating important constituents rather than satisfying any one group. It is misdirected by the way it is being paid into defining performance and results as what will produce the budget rather than as what will produce contribution.

We should also leave behind discrimination, because it is narrow-minded and ignorant, denies contact and warmth; and corrodes mankind's belief that we can better ourselves. The only way to avoid misunderstanding, war and bloodshed is to defend freedom of expression and to communicate with sincerity, concern and good intentions.

We call an intention good which is right in itself, but the action is good, not because it contains within it some good, but because it issues from a good intention.

How often it is that a small action becomes great by its intention. And how often it is that a great action becomes small by its intention.

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

A man can only be judged by his actions, and not by his good intentions or his beliefs.

If our mind is in conflict, not balanced with our body and with the needs of the soul, then there is a fundamental disunity in our life. Only if we have unity within ourselves, we can create unity in the world around us. You can't give something you don't have, even if you have all good intentions

As sons and daughters of our Heavenly Father, we are capable of so much more. For that, good intentions are not enough. We must do. Even more important, we must become what Heavenly Father wants us to be.

One cannot use an evil action with reference to a good intention.

Hell is full of good intentions and wills.

The single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into action.

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