Top 300 Terry Goodkind Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Your life is yours alone, so rise up and live it.”

— Terry Goodkind

102. “I felt like I’d been misplaced in the cosmos and I belonged in Maine.”

— Terry Goodkind

103. “Those who have come here to hate should leave now; for in their hate, they only betray themselves.”

— Terry Goodkind

104. “We reap a reward merely in the act of helping others. We never know how, or if, that reward will come back to us. Helping is the reward; none other is needed nor better.”

— Terry Goodkind

105. “Fussing keeps you sharp. When you get old, you need to stay sharp.”

— Terry Goodkind

106. “The most important rule there is, the Wizard’s Sixth Rule: the only sovereign you can allow to rule you is reason.”

— Terry Goodkind

107. “As long as we have choices in life and use our heads, there is always the possibility of turning around the worst situation.”

— Terry Goodkind

108. “In her eyes he saw something that attracted him more than anything else. Intelligence. He saw it flaring there, burning in her, and through it all he felt an overriding sense of her integrity. Richard felt safe.”

— Terry Goodkind

109. “The truth can seem awfully small and insignificant when compared to a mountain of lies.”

— Terry Goodkind

110. “I never could understand why some writers treat women as helpless. Every woman I know is strong in her own unique way.”

— Terry Goodkind

111. “The power needs truth to work. Truth is reality, the laws of nature. They’re inseparable. That relationship is represented by the word woven into the hilt. That makes this sword meant to serve more than just the power. It is also meant to serve the truth. This is the Sword of Truth.”

— Terry Goodkind

112. “Books served to keep hard-won knowledge safe. They endured.”

— Terry Goodkind

113. “Life is the future, not the past.”

— Terry Goodkind

114. “It allows you to say things that sound very dramatic and get away with it. If you had characters in modern fiction say the same things as they’re driving down the street in an Oldsmobile they’d sound ludicrous!”

— Terry Goodkind

115. “It is a mistake to say something cannot be done simply because you don’t know how to do it.”

— Terry Goodkind

116. “To the right person, the person who is truly born to it, duty is a form of love, through which all is possible. Duty is not always a denial of things, but an expansion of them to others. Duty is not always a chore, but is best carried out with love.”

— Terry Goodkind

117. “Perception was easily accomplished, required little effort, and it never had to stand the test of reality.”

— Terry Goodkind

118. “Ever since I was really little, I’ve had characters that were in my mind.”

— Terry Goodkind

119. “The greatest harm can result from the best intentions – Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander.”

— Terry Goodkind

120. “Hesitation is a mistake that invites defeat. I would not be Mord-Sith had I not hesitated when I was young.” – Cara.”

— Terry Goodkind

121. “Life for the strongest. There is no sympathy for the slain, only admiration for the winner’s strength.”

— Terry Goodkind

122. “Each day lived,” Richard said, “is one less of our limited number of days gone forever. Time therefore has relevance and meaning to us. Life is precious, so time is precious. Time is how we put value on things such as love. We give our most precious commodity, our time-a part of our lives-over to those we love.”

— Terry Goodkind

123. “Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander, the great and honorable wizard, stood alone on the wizard’s rock his father had given him, and stared out into the night, thinking wizard’s thoughts. “Nothing is ever easy,” he whispered.”

— Terry Goodkind

124. “Evil grants no mercy, and to attempt to appease it is nothing more than a piecemeal surrender to it. Surrender to evil is slavery at best, death at worse. -Richard Rahl.”

— Terry Goodkind

125. “If you make enough predictions, eventually you will get one right, but that is by accident, not design.”

— Terry Goodkind

126. “Her green eyes came unafraid to his. The connection was so intense that it threatened to drain his sense of self. He felt that he had always known her, that she had always been a part of him, that her needs were his needs.”

— Terry Goodkind

127. “A true Seeker, one who can make a difference, must show himself to be a Seeker. The wizard doesn’t point to someone and say, ‘Here is the Sword of Truth, you will be the Seeker.’ He doesn’t really have a choice in the matter.”

— Terry Goodkind

128. “Kahlan guide me. Kahlan teach me. Kahlan protect me. In your light I thrive. In your mercy I am sheltered. In your wisdom I am humbled. I live only to love you. My life is yours.”

— Terry Goodkind

129. “Their conscious, deliberate act of murder takes the irreplaceable value of life from another. A murderer, by his own choice to kill, forfeits the right to his own life.”

— Terry Goodkind

130. “You can’t help how you feel and I understand that. Sometimes a person can’t talk their heart out of how it feels, despite how hard you try.”

— Terry Goodkind

131. “My brother always says that real power is not brokered in public.”

— Terry Goodkind

132. “Cut the attacker down, to cut them down to their very soul.”

— Terry Goodkind

133. “In this world, everyone must die. None of us has any choice in that. Our choice is how we wish to live.”

— Terry Goodkind

134. “Do you know, Richard, that it’s the weight of one flake of snow that is one too many, and causes an avalanche? Without that one, last flake, the catastrophe would not happen. When using magic, you must know which is the one snowflake too many before you add its weight. The avalanche will be out of all proportion to what you think the weight of that flake could invoke.”

— Terry Goodkind

135. “Appearance, after all, was a reflection of what a person thought of themselves and therefore, by extension, of others.”

— Terry Goodkind

136. “Wizard’s First Rule: people are stupid, they believe what they want to believe.”

— Terry Goodkind

137. “I wish people had half the honor of dragons.”

— Terry Goodkind

138. “People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it’s true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People’s heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool.”

— Terry Goodkind

139. “Since the dawn of man, there have always been people bent on harming others. There have been periods of peace and enlightenment, and there have been dark times, but through it all, mankind survived. That cycle has repeated itself over and over. It wasn’t always easy, and despite those who would have it otherwise, life went on.”

— Terry Goodkind

140. “He knew, though, that there was no such thing as fair in life. Existence had no agenda. Life simply existed. It was up to them to fight for life to be worthwhile and good if that was what they wanted.”

— Terry Goodkind

141. “Though she was ungifted, she could clearly feel the power of the magic the sword now possessed. It was power unlike anything she ever imagined. It churned the way the storm had. It held more power than the storm had. It was fury and rage and love and life all folded together over and over, blending them into the finest layers of something new, something remarkable. This was now a weapon unlike any other, more than any other.”

— Terry Goodkind

142. “Such beliefs were born in man’s willful refusal to use his mind, in his lust for the unearned, his wish for success without effort. Such beliefs were the embodiment of hatred for all that was good, hatred for virtue, hatred for value. It was ultimately a hatred of themselves, of life, of existence. It was that hate, that dedication to death, that was the true manifestation of evil.”

— Terry Goodkind

143. “There is no such thing as pure good or pure evil, least of all in people. In the best of us there are thoughts or deeds that are wicked, and in the worst of us, at least some virtue. An adversary is not one who does loathsome acts for their own sake. He always has a reason that to him is justification. My cat eats mice. Does that make him bad? I don’t think so, and the cat doesn’t think so, but I would bet the mice have a different opinion.”

— Terry Goodkind

144. “Thunder without sound jolted the air around her. The violence of it was magnificent, immaculate, glorious.”

— Terry Goodkind

145. “Because, Richard, many people must be ruled to thrive. In their selfishness and greed, they see free people as their oppressors.”

— Terry Goodkind

146. “I hate telling that story to people who’ve been struggling for years.”

— Terry Goodkind

147. “Save your anger for the enemy. Here it will do you no good; there, it can overcome fear. Use this time now to teach your sword what to do, so later it will do it without conscious thought.”

— Terry Goodkind

148. “Safety is only an illusion when evil is on the hunt. I can’t stand by and watch. I have to act. It isn’t easy to absolve one’s self of guilt.”

— Terry Goodkind

149. “If we timidly submit to tyranny, we will never have the chance to test our wings.”

— Terry Goodkind

150. “I asked him what the amulet meant to him, what its meaning was. At first, I thought he wasn’t going to answer. But then, in a haunting voice, he said that it represented the dance with death. I was horrified by that. He said the dance with death was the way of the War Wizard.”

— Terry Goodkind