Top 300 Terry Goodkind Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Take care, Seeker. You have the gift. Use it. Use everything you have to fight. Don’t give in. Don’t let him rule you. If you are to die, die fighting with everything you have, everything you know. That is the way of a dragon.”

— Terry Goodkind

152. “History is rarely made by reasonable men.”

— Terry Goodkind

153. “The good in life is what quenches hatred in normal people, the way a smile can calm a quarrel. But in those people who carry this flaw, their hatred burns so hot they come to hate what is good in life specifically because they don’t want to stop hating. Hatred becomes the driving purpose of their lives. They live to hate.”

— Terry Goodkind

154. “Hatred has such powerful emotions attached to it that others take it up out of fear. In that way, hate spreads like panic in a crowd.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

156. “Your destiny is to find the truth.”

— Terry Goodkind

157. “Anger made a better warrior than fear.”

— Terry Goodkind

158. “Better to see the dangers in the world and be ready when someone inevitably turns on you. It is a far preferable surprise to find that a person is kinder than you think, than to discover he is secretly a traitor.”

— Terry Goodkind

159. “Being afraid something is true is accepting the possibility. Accepting the possibility is the first step to believing. At least you are smart enough to question. Think of how easy it is to believe, for people who don’t question, who don’t even know how to question. For most people, it’s not the truth that is important, it’s the cause. Rahl is intelligent; he has given them a cause.”

— Terry Goodkind

160. “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

161. “Life could be brutal, but that such brutality did not define life or its purpose, and that the sexes were not rivals, but meant to share together in the work and joys of life.”

— Terry Goodkind

162. “The best we can to the best of our ability based on what we know. That’s why the truth is so important. Evil abhors those with the ability.”

— Terry Goodkind

163. “Not all choices in life are ones you would like, but those are all that are presented to you. Sometimes you must choose what is better for the ones you love than yourself.”

— Terry Goodkind

164. “Civilization must always defend itself.”

— Terry Goodkind

165. “The truth has value.”

— Terry Goodkind

166. “I know you and I know the way you feel, but you have to listen to me. The time has not yet come. It may never come. You may think I’m wrong in this, but if you close your eyes to the reality of what is, in favor of what you would wish just because you’re the Mother Confessor and feel responsible for the people of the Midlands, then there is no reason for us to bother hoping we’ll be together again because we won’t. We will be dead, and the cause of freedom will be dead.”

— Terry Goodkind

167. “It’s easy to lead people when they have a sense of purpose. Sense of purpose is more important by far than the truth.”

— Terry Goodkind

168. “He wanted this to show the raw power of volition. The man and woman he carved were his refuge against his despair over his captivity. They embodied freedom of spirit. They embodied reason rising up to triumph.”

— Terry Goodkind

169. “Leadership is a nurturing of those under your command.”

— Terry Goodkind

170. “I love you, Kahlan. Never anyone before you, nor ever after. Only you.” His eyes said it even better.”

— Terry Goodkind

171. “The power is neither evil not good; it simply exists. It is up to the mind of man to put it to use.”

— Terry Goodkind

172. “If I was a nobody you wouldn’t be so eager to see me dead. Just like these people you know that I am devoted to the truth. That is why you want to eliminate me.” – Magda Searus.”

— Terry Goodkind

173. “Emotion did not play a part in truth, only reality did.”

— Terry Goodkind

174. “Grrratch luuug Raaaach aaarg.”

— Terry Goodkind

175. “We teach our children to help those in need because one day we might be the ones in need, and we can only hope to earn such help if we are worthy, if we are the kind who would give it and not just receive it. We believe in treating others as we would want to be treated.”

— Terry Goodkind

176. “You envisioned the idea of a Confessor for the right reasons. Life is truth. Truth is Life. You wanted a way to seek truth. Such a cause, in the promotion of life, is noble.”

— Terry Goodkind

177. “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

178. “Even a good person can be swept up with the sentiments of a crowd and come to hold perverse beliefs.”

— Terry Goodkind

179. “Slaves, slaves to anything or anyone, despite how much they abhor it, will often cling to that slavery out of fear the alternative would be insufferable.”

— Terry Goodkind

180. “Confidence can be a dangerous thing. Fear can keep you safe, sometimes.”

— Terry Goodkind

181. “I have found that people do not often want to believe the truth. It is of little value to them.”

— Terry Goodkind

182. “You mean that it’s not only what he does that makes him dangerous, but also what he feels justified in doing?”

— Terry Goodkind

183. “Little things are a good place to start. Larger understanding is built on little things. We put those little things we learn together into larger concepts.”

— Terry Goodkind

184. “Your loveliness is not a mask, layered over a rotten core. It blossoms from the beauty inside.”

— Terry Goodkind

185. “She had never asked why it was right for her to be a slave to another’s desires, but not evil for them to enslave her. She was not contributing to the betterment of mankind, but was merely a servant to countless puling little tyrants. Evil was not one large entity, but a ceaseless torrent of small wrongs left unchallenged, until they festered into monsters.”

— Terry Goodkind

186. “Free people were not ruled. Freedom had first to be valued before its existence could be demanded.”

— Terry Goodkind

187. “You can’t expect to walk through life without stepping in the muck now and again. The important thing is to maintain your footing when you do, and not fall on your face and make it worse.”

— Terry Goodkind

188. “Surprise was their greatest weapon. He didn’t want to give it up without a very good reason.”

— Terry Goodkind

189. “Don’t try to fix the past, dear one – it can’t be done.”

— Terry Goodkind

190. “We have people like that in our world, too. People who say that freedom is no longer practical, that we must surrender it for a greater common good.” “Fear them,” she whispered. “They are the heart of evil. They tolerate tyranny, excuse it, compromise with it. In so doing they always bring savagery and death upon the rest of us.”

— Terry Goodkind

191. “But who I was, who you loved, no longer exists. I have passed on. In your world, only my memory can exist. Your loyalty to me because of that memory is a part of life, but it can become disloyalty to yourself if you hold it so closely that it crowds out the rest of life.”

— Terry Goodkind

192. “This was life as it should be lived – proud, reasoned, and a slave to no other man. This was the rightful exaltation of the individual, the nobility of the human spirit.”

— Terry Goodkind

193. “Surprise is sometimes the best advantage a warrior can have.”

— Terry Goodkind

194. “Don’t make promises, because circumstances have a way of making you regret them.”

— Terry Goodkind

195. “My past is my story to keep, and my future will be written by me, in my own way, not through the control or influence of you or anyone else.”

— Terry Goodkind

196. “If an idea was sound, it had to have a life beyond a leader, or the leader had failed.”

— Terry Goodkind

197. “Knowledge comes as it will. Life’s lessons come at the most surprising times.”

— Terry Goodkind

198. “They don’t, exactly. The threat of their intervention makes it unnecessary. Wizards call it the paradox of power: if you have power, and are ready, able, and willing to use it, you don’t need to exercise your power.”

— Terry Goodkind

199. “As it turns out, that persistence is a requirement. Thus, he would tell me, you need the dark to show the light, so you shouldn’t curse darkness. You needed death to define life.”

— Terry Goodkind

200. “Sometimes lunatics are so driven, they can take the whole world into madness with them.”

— Terry Goodkind