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No, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is not in the Bible. The words are not in the King James Version, and they are not in any standard translation. There is no chapter and verse for it. And here is the part that surprises most people: nobody can say who first said it either. It has been floating through English for about five hundred years with no author attached. Even John Wesley, who did more than almost anyone to put it in our mouths, could only call it “a true saying” and leave the credit blank.
Almost everyone assumes this one is scripture, and it is easy to see why. It is short, it mentions hell, and it has the ring of a warning handed down from somewhere serious. So where did it actually come from? The trail is longer and stranger than you would guess.
Where “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions” Really Comes From
The oldest English versions of this saying do not mention a road at all, and nothing is paved. They simply say that hell is full of good intentions.
That “full of” form shows up in a 1523 letter by the Spanish writer Antonio de Guevara, which reached English readers through Edward Hellowes’s translation in the 1570s. It turns up again in Richard Younge in 1655, in James Howell in 1659, and then in John Ray’s A Collection of English Proverbs in 1670, where it is recorded as “Hell is full of good meanings and wishes.”
Read that older version carefully, because it is making a quieter claim than the modern one. “Hell is full of good intentions” says that wanting to do better is not the same as doing better. The modern version, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” says something much harder: that the good intentions are the paving. That they are what the road is made of.
The Surprise: The Preachers Who Spread It Did Not Know Who Said It
The “paved” wording enters the record in the 1700s, and it enters through the pulpit.
John Wesley wrote it in his journal on 10 July 1736: “‘Tis a true saying, ‘Hell is paved with good intentions.'” He used it again five years later in a sermon called The Almost Christian, preached before the University of Oxford on 25 July 1741. This time he put it like this: “Hell is paved, saith one, with good intentions.”
Saith one. Somebody said it. Wesley did not know who.
George Whitefield reached for the same line and had the same problem. In one sermon he introduces it as “Hell, says a good divine, is paved with good intentions.” In another, printed in 1771, he tries again: “One of the good old Puritans says…”
Three goes at naming an author, three polite shrugs. Two of the most famous preachers of their century were passing along a saying neither of them could source, and both were honest enough to flag it as borrowed rather than claim it or call it scripture.
Samuel Johnson gets the credit in a lot of places, and he did say it. James Boswell records him in the Life of Samuel Johnson, published 1791, telling an acquaintance: “Sir, hell is paved with good intentions.” But Boswell is writing down a conversation from 1775, by which point the saying had already been in print for forty years. Johnson was quoting, not coining. His version simply became the famous one.
The Saint Bernard Attribution Does Not Hold Up
You will often see the line credited to Bernard of Clairvaux, the twelfth-century abbot. That attribution is weak, and it is worth knowing why.
It traces back to a letter by Francis de Sales, dated 21 November 1604, in which he passes on a French version — hell is full of good wills and good desires — and hands it to Bernard. That is roughly four and a half centuries after Bernard died, and the line has not been found in Bernard’s own writings. So this is not a case of “Bernard definitely never wrote it.” It is a case of one later writer saying he did, with nothing underneath it. That is a different, weaker thing.
And the “Road” Is the Newest Part of All
The familiar modern shape — road, paving, destination — is the last piece to arrive, and sources genuinely disagree about when.
Some point to an 1811 English translation of the German writer Johann Jacob Rambach, which renders a line of his as “the road to hell is paved with good resolutions.” Others give the first printing of the full modern wording as Henry G. Bohn’s A Hand-book of Proverbs in 1855. A London newspaper in 1828 complicated matters further by calling the whole thing a Portuguese proverb.
We are not going to pick a winner between those, because the honest answer is that nobody has pinned it down. What all of it does show is that the version most of us grew up with is the modern one. The “paved” wording is roughly three hundred years old, the “road to” wording younger still, and behind both of them sits an older and gentler ancestor with no author attached to it either. If you like a saying with an unresolved paper trail, we went through much the same hunt with who really said “give a man a fish”.
The Closest Thing in Scripture, and Why It Is Not the Same
There is one verse that may have lent this proverb its paving stones, and it is not where most people would look.
Ecclesiasticus 21:10 reads: “The way of sinners is made plain with stones, but at the end thereof is the pit of hell.”
Two things to say about that. First, Ecclesiasticus — also called Sirach — is part of the Apocrypha. It was printed in the original 1611 King James Bible and it is still printed in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, but it is not in most Protestant Bibles today. So depending on which Bible is on your shelf, that verse may or may not be in it.
Second, and more important: look at what it actually says. It is the way of sinners that is made smooth. The verse is about a path that feels easy. It says nothing whatsoever about good intentions. The image may well have travelled from here. The accusation did not.
So what does the Bible say about meaning well and falling short? More than you might expect, and it pulls in two directions at once.
On one side, it agrees that sincerity is no guarantee. Proverbs 14:12 says:
“There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” (Proverbs 14:12, KJV)
That is a real warning, and the proverb is not wrong to echo it. Wanting something to be right does not make it right.
But then the Bible does something the proverb never does. It treats intention as the very thing God pays attention to. Proverbs 16:2:
“All the ways of a man are clean in his own eyes; but the LORD weigheth the spirits.” (Proverbs 16:2, KJV)
Weighing the spirit is weighing the motive. Not dismissing it. Weighing it.
And then there is a line from Paul that sits almost directly opposite the proverb. He is writing to a church that wanted to give more to a collection than it could actually afford, and were embarrassed about the gap. His ruling is this:
“For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.” (2 Corinthians 8:12, KJV)
A willing mind is accepted. Not according to what you managed. According to what you had.
Put the two together and scripture is less binary than the proverb. Good intentions are not enough on their own — Proverbs 14:12 is blunt about that. But nowhere does scripture say good intentions are what damn you. Those are two very different claims, and only one of them is in the Bible.
Why the Difference Matters
Here is the thing about this proverb: it was built to be used on yourself, and it mostly gets used on other people.
When Wesley said it from a pulpit, he was talking to people who kept resolving to change and kept not changing. In his mouth it is a goad aimed inward — you have been meaning to for years, and meaning to is not the same as doing. That is fair, and most of us could stand to hear it.
Turned outward, it becomes something colder. It gets said about the person who tried to help and made it worse. The relative who stepped in. The friend who gave the wrong advice sincerely. The parent who did what they genuinely believed was best and got it wrong. Aimed there, the proverb stops being a nudge and becomes a verdict: your sincerity is the problem.
And it lands much harder if you believe God said it. That is the real cost of the mix-up. A proverb from an unknown source is advice you can weigh and argue with. The same sentence, believed to be scripture, arrives as a ruling with no appeal.
It is not a ruling. It is a five-hundred-year-old human observation that drifted from “hell is full of good intentions” into something considerably sharper, and it reached us because sincere, careful people kept passing it on. Wesley passed it on. Most of us heard it from someone who loved us and meant it kindly.
The gap it points at is real. Anyone who has ever meant to call, meant to apologise, meant to start on Monday knows that gap from the inside — we have written about why we can’t make ourselves do the things we know we should. The proverb names that gap well. It just has no authority to tell you where the gap leads.
So, Is “The Road to Hell Is Paved With Good Intentions” in the Bible?
No. It is not a Bible verse, in any translation. Its oldest English form says only that hell is full of good intentions, and even that is a proverb, not scripture. The author is unknown, and after a great deal of searching by people who do this for a living, is likely to stay unknown.
You can still use it. Pointed at yourself, on a Monday, about something you have been meaning to do for two years, it does good work. Just know what it is when you say it, and what it is not. And if the person in front of you tried something hard and it did not work, the older line from Paul is the better one to have ready: a willing mind is accepted according to what you had, not according to what you did not. If you are curious about sayings in this same family, we also looked at whether “man proposes, God disposes” is in the Bible — another one almost everybody files under scripture.
A Short Prayer for When Meaning Well Was Not Enough
God, I tried. I meant it, and it did not work, and some of it made things harder for people I love. I am not sure what to do with that. Take the part of it that was willing, and do something with it. Teach me the difference between meaning well and doing well, without letting me believe my sincerity was the sin. Amen.
Discussion Question
Which saying did you grow up certain was in the Bible, only to find out later that it was not? Tell us in the comments — we read every one, and yours might be our next article.
Social Share Posts
1. I always assumed “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” was a Bible verse. It isn’t — and nobody knows who said it. John Wesley quoted it in 1736 and could only call it “a true saying.” Five hundred years, no author.
2. Didn’t know this: Wesley and Whitefield both preached “hell is paved with good intentions” and neither could name who said it first. “Saith one.” “A good divine.” “One of the good old Puritans.” Three shrugs.
3. The Bible never says good intentions pave the road to hell. What it does say, in 2 Corinthians 8:12, is that a willing mind is accepted according to what you have — not according to what you don’t.
Questions & Answers
Is “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” in the Bible?
No. “The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is not in the Bible. The words do not appear in the King James Version or in any standard translation, and there is no chapter and verse for them. It is an English proverb whose oldest recorded form, from the 1500s and 1600s, reads “hell is full of good intentions” rather than paved with them. The nearest scriptural echo is Ecclesiasticus 21:10, a verse from the Apocrypha, and it is about the way of sinners being made smooth, not about good intentions at all.
Who said “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”?
Nobody knows who first said “the road to hell is paved with good intentions,” and that is the honest answer after centuries of searching. John Wesley wrote “Hell is paved with good intentions” in his journal in 1736 and called it “a true saying” without naming a source. Samuel Johnson said it in 1775, as recorded by James Boswell in 1791, but he was quoting an existing proverb. The common credit to Bernard of Clairvaux rests on a single letter by Francis de Sales from 1604, some four and a half centuries after Bernard lived, and the line is not found in Bernard’s own works.
What does “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” mean?
“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” means that intending to do good is not the same as doing good, and that intentions left unacted on can lead somewhere bad. Its older form, “hell is full of good intentions,” made the gentler point that hell holds a great many unkept resolutions. The modern wording goes further and suggests the intentions themselves are the paving stones. Historically the saying was preached as a warning to oneself about unkept resolutions, not as a judgement on other people whose sincere efforts went wrong.
What Bible verse is closest to “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”?
The closest verse in a Protestant Bible is Proverbs 14:12 in the King James Version: “There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.” That verse warns that something can feel right and still end badly. It does not say good intentions cause the damage. Scripture also runs the other way in 2 Corinthians 8:12: “For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not.”
Is “the path to hell is paved with good intentions” the same saying?
Yes. “The path to hell is paved with good intentions,” “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” and the shorter “hell is paved with good intentions” are all versions of the same English proverb, and none of them is in the Bible. The shortest form is the oldest of the three in print, appearing in John Wesley’s writings from 1736. The “road to” wording is the most recent addition, showing up in English in the 1800s.
