Como dizer em Inglês: De boas intenções o inferno está cheio!

Hey guys. Today I'd like to introduce you to an expression with the word road that you may have never heard of. Road is what you drive on while on a trip for example. Something very interesting about the word road is that it will very often be followed by the preposition down, as in "I've been driving down this road for hours trying to find my way back". But let's go to the heart of the matter.

There's a very common expression in english containing the word road, which is "the road to hell is paved with good intentions". Can you tell me how do we say that expression in Portuguese? Yes, it is right in the title of the post, and as you may have noticed, it doesn't contain the word road. That's a great example of idiomatic differences between two languages like Portuguese and English. Not always will you find an expression correspondent with the same words. It's not impossible to find them, but keep in mind they're the minority. Now let's imagine a little story!

Let's suppose you have a very close friend you turn to everytime you wanna open up. One day, you decide to tell him a secret that you've kept with yourself for years. As I said before, this friend of yours is really close to you, and you wouldn't tell him the secret if you didn't judge him as a really reliable person. The problem is that this time, you've been totally disappointed by him. You find out he went around telling people about your secret without any kind of discretion, and yet is not willing to take responsability for his bad attitude. Everytime you try to talk to him about what he's done, he says things like: I didn't mean to hurt your feelings; I only wanted to help you. Of course these things he tells you don't mean a thing, so you say: The road to hell is paved with good intentions; your good intentions do not matter to me now. But wait, what do you mean by that?

When you use that expression, you're just saying people often mean well but do bad things, like your friend did by giving away your secret. That expression is very often used in the kind of situation I just described. That is, when you want someone to take responsability for his bad atitudes or confess what he's done, but he keeps saying he meant well or did it with good intentions.
Take care!