Top 300 Terry Goodkind Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Maybe I would like to see beauty again before I die.” “Bah. What would you carve? What would you see before you die? What could be worth your life?” “Man’s nobility – the most sublime form of beauty.”

— Terry Goodkind

152. “Life connects us all to magic, as illustrated through the design of the Grace. So, for a Confessor, I don’t need a gifted person, just a living one.”

— Terry Goodkind

153. “Truth is hard to sell; it gives no sense of purpose. It is simply truth.”

— Terry Goodkind

154. “Richard’s mind was filled with the flow and form of the dance with death, the way of a war wizard. He was lost in that dance he had come to know so well.”

— Terry Goodkind

155. “A Grace connected creating the World of life, and the world of the dead in pathways of magic.”

— Terry Goodkind

156. “She’s the first thing in my mind when I wake and the last thing in my mind before I sleep. I’ve never felt like this before, Zedd, never felt this alone before.”

— Terry Goodkind

157. “Powerful people who lose power do not feel anguish and heartache like a jilted lover.”

— Terry Goodkind

158. “To those who would dominate you, knowledge must be crushed, because people who understand are people who will stand against the unfairness of the elite.”

— Terry Goodkind

159. “Standing there, chisel and mallet in hand, gazing at the statue that was his vision in stone, was a moment when Richard could savor the supreme achievement of having his creation exist exactly as he had originally conceived it. For this singular moment in time, it was complete, and it was his alone.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

161. “Being afraid something is true is accepting the possibility. Accepting the possibility is the first step to believing.”

— Terry Goodkind

162. “You can never stop all wrongdoing, but if you don’t punish it, then it proliferates until anarchy wears the robes of tolerance and understanding.”

— Terry Goodkind

163. “Chickens can move and flop for hours after their heads are cut off. They have no heartbeat either,” Naja said, “and that doesn’t involve magic.”

— Terry Goodkind

164. “Killing is a terrible thing, too. I hate killing. But killing isn’t necessarily wrong.”

— Terry Goodkind

165. “Intent is guilt. Failure to successfully carry out the intent does not absolve the guilt.”

— Terry Goodkind

166. “The power of Orden predates the star shift.”

— Terry Goodkind

167. “And right now you’re doing it backwards. You are only concentrating on why the problem is impossible. You are not thinking of the solution.”

— Terry Goodkind

168. “You are not struggling to rule, but to give others a chance at ruling their own lives. So stop ruling and let them live those lives.”

— Terry Goodkind

169. “I know, Magda, your heart, and your loyalty to your love for me. But don’t let that be the end of your ability to love. That love wouldn’t harm me, or diminish me, or change what we had. It can only add to you and who you are. You need to embrace the reality of what is, not what was.”

— Terry Goodkind

170. “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

171. “I’m going to do the worst possible thing I could do to you and your people – what my grandfather would have done to you. “I’m going to leave you all to suffer the consequences of your own actions.”

— Terry Goodkind

172. “Oftentimes it’s easier for lunatics to attract impassioned followers than it is for sensible people to get people to listen to reason. People are often more willing to believe lies than the truth. Lies can be made to sound pleasant. The truth, by its very nature, isn’t always so attractive.”

— Terry Goodkind

173. “Books were links that spanned such missing human bonds or even times of savagery and its resulting ages of ignorance.”

— Terry Goodkind

174. “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

175. “In the end, people believed what they wanted to believe. The truth had very little to do with it.”

— Terry Goodkind

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “A book is read one page at a time. A shelf is read one book at a time. A library is read one shelf at a time.”

— Terry Goodkind

180. “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

181. “Death, though, was part of life. There could not be life without death always shadowing it.”

— Terry Goodkind

182. “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

183. “Create a better idea of what the key should be. One that makes more sense to people, so that they believe in the diversion we create.”

— Terry Goodkind

184. “She had lived her whole life on shifting quicksand, where reason and the intellect were not to be trusted, where only faith was valid, and blind faith was sacred. She, herself, had enforced mindless conformity to that empty evil.”

— Terry Goodkind

185. “Teasingly she took the apple from his mouth. Juice ran down his chin. Slowly, deliberately, she leaned over and licked the sweet juice from his chin. I will have to admit though, that I will never look at an apple in quite the same way.”

— Terry Goodkind

186. “Ah, but Sorceress, on such a journey as ours, is one ever truly done with saving the world?”

— Terry Goodkind

187. “Of course, disinformation,” Quinn said. “I can do that. I’ll leave out critical events, then I’ll put in false information and twist everything that has happened around into a vague, shadowy history that obscures what really took place.”

— Terry Goodkind

188. “It’s so good to see you,” she whispered privately in the midst of the crowd. When she held him, there was no crowd, there was only him. There was always only him in her heart and soul.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

190. “It is not a weakness, child, to be a victim.”

— Terry Goodkind

191. “He had sometimes looked into her eyes and whispered to himself how bewitching she was, as if she weren’t there hearing him, as if he were all alone looking upon some exceptional specimen rather than his wife.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

194. “Have you heard the old adage advising to always grow oleanders at your back door?” Nicci asked.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

196. “The truth has value.”

— Terry Goodkind

197. “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

198. “No one is as fanatical as a convert.”

— Terry Goodkind

199. “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

200. “When you hear the word ‘tyranny of magic’ as we heard from Elder Caldell, you will know that it is the calling card of killers. Don’t be fooled by their platitudes that is for the common good. Their real power is to strip us of our abilities so that they may easily conquer and rule us.”

— Terry Goodkind