Top 300 Terry Goodkind Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Boundary wardens, Zedd thought, were tougher than they had a right to be.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

254. “He wanted to know things, not reveal them.”

— Terry Goodkind

255. “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

256. “Of all the people who came before us, Magda, you were the only one who represented truth. I want you to know that. – Councilman Sadler.”

— Terry Goodkind

257. “Duty?” Kahlan wiped a hand across her face. “Harold, you can’t blindly follow that woman’s whim. The route to life and liberty exists only through reason. She may be queen, but reason can be your only true sovereign. To fail to use reason in this, to fail to think, is intellectual anarchy.”

— Terry Goodkind

258. “Don’t give up the calling, Magda. Know yourself. Know what you are. Though few would admit it, even those on the council, I truly believe we all need you. – Councilman Sadler.”

— Terry Goodkind

259. “I want you to use me to create a Confessor.”

— Terry Goodkind

260. “Your forces will try to use shields, but I can tell you from experience that shields don’t work. Shields key off life. They have nothing to latch on to with the dead.”

— Terry Goodkind

261. “Everybody knows it. Wizards are supposed to have beards. It’s common knowledge.”

— Terry Goodkind

262. “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

263. “My mother always said that if you predicted rain long enough, sooner or later you would get wet and be proven right.”

— Terry Goodkind

264. “The reason, as I had learned from my father, is that there is no certainty in death. Because there is no beginning or end, there is no way to measure how long your time.”

— Terry Goodkind

265. “Faith itself, you see, is the key-the magic wand that they wave over the bubbling brew they have concocted to render it ‘self-evident’.”

— Terry Goodkind

266. “It was important for a person not to let their body or mind become slow and dull. Oba believed it was important to learn new things. He believed it was important to grow. He thought it was important for a person to use what they had learned. That was how people grew.”

— Terry Goodkind

267. “The tightly focused battle was an orgy of slaughter. Limbs, heads, and parts of bodies from men and women alike littered the ground.”

— Terry Goodkind

268. “There seemed to be some inner need in many people to believe that the world would end in some cataclysmic event. Usually in the very near future.”

— Terry Goodkind

269. “When you are facing superior strength, you must use your wits.”

— Terry Goodkind

270. “His word alone stood between Kahlan and oblivion.”

— Terry Goodkind

271. “We believe in treating others as we would want to be treated.”

— Terry Goodkind

272. “Because I need it to be mine alone while I carve it. I need solitude with it as I shape it. When I’m finished, then the world can have it, but when I work on it, it is to be my vision and mine alone. I wish no one to see it before it is finished.”

— Terry Goodkind

273. “Like all power, it simply exists. It’s the user who determines what use it will be put to.”

— Terry Goodkind

274. “But you know how Richard feels. He thinks it would be wrong – more than that, he thinks it would be irresponsible to give in to such a wish when reason tells him he must not.”

— Terry Goodkind

275. “Blood erupted in great throbbing gouts from a severed artery at the side of his neck. His open windpipe blew clouds of red mist as he struggled to breathe.”

— Terry Goodkind

276. “Desperately, his mind raced as he cried, trying to make time go backward, to do it again differently, to ignore the voices, to keep hold of her hand, to save her.”

— Terry Goodkind

277. “This is how tyrants win the will of the people: with lies.”

— Terry Goodkind

278. “You are not destined for anything. You make your own destiny.”

— Terry Goodkind

279. “Richard clenched the strip in his fist. “It’s some kind of riddle. I hate riddles.”

— Terry Goodkind

280. “That is what we believe in and what we are fighting for. The right to the joy of life. The right to our own life. The right to love.”

— Terry Goodkind

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

— Terry Goodkind

282. “He’d often said that keeping things to himself was a matter of survival. Barracus had often told her that if she was doing something important she shouldn’t tell people anything they didn’t need to know. He lived his life by that rule. In fact, he often wouldn’t tell Magda about things he thought she didn’t need to know. Like why he killed himself.”

— Terry Goodkind

283. “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

284. “I hate magic,” Berdine muttered. “It makes no sense.”

— Terry Goodkind

285. “Your only chance is to let the truth escape.”

— Terry Goodkind

286. “The Spiritist is said to be a dangerous woman.”

— Terry Goodkind

287. “Her life was hers to live by right. She belonged to no one.”

— Terry Goodkind

288. “Though it hadn’t been in his mind, and even though he would not entertain such an offer, he was nevertheless disappointed to find she thought the idea repulsive.”

— Terry Goodkind

289. “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

290. “The woman had a voice that could unwind a good rope.”

— Terry Goodkind

291. “If we are to survive, we need magic now more than ever to defend ourselves from those in the Old World. We need to learn, discover, create. We need to use our reasoning minds and truth.”

— Terry Goodkind

292. “Moral compromise rejects the concept of right and wrong. It says that everyone is equal, all desires are equally valid, all action is equally valid, so everyone should compromise to get along.”

— Terry Goodkind

293. “Fear triggers need, need powers sincerity. Sincerity is the required element.”

— Terry Goodkind

294. “We don’t want to lose you Lord Rahl. We don’t want to go back to way things were.” She sounded on the verge of tears. “We like being able to do simple things, like make a joke, and laugh. We could never do such things before. We always lived in fear that if we said the wrong thing we would be beaten, or worse. Now that we have seen another way, we don’t want to go back to that. If you throw your life away for the Midlands, then we will.- Cara.”

— Terry Goodkind

295. “Anger is a shield for the power of the sword’s magic, so that helped.”

— Terry Goodkind

296. “We have a responsibility to life. The living should be our only concern. Since it is the Sword of Truth – a weapon created to fight for the truth – people won’t have reason to expect that it could also actually be the key to the power of Orden. Quinn, you know how dangerous the power of Orden is. Used in the wrong way. it very well could breach the veil and destroy the world of life. We have to do everything in our power to see to it that such a thing never comes to pass.”

— Terry Goodkind

297. “We all can be only what we are, nothing more, or less.”

— Terry Goodkind

298. “At their root, the key and the Confessor both authenticate the truth. The Confessor’s power would force the subject to reveal the truth, while all of the coded alignments of the key involve proofing it against reality. Reality is truth. Therefore, both the Confessor and the key need the same formulas to initiate their ultimate function.”

— Terry Goodkind

299. “I understand, Lord Rahl. Find the wizard Zedd and the sorceress Nicci and get them out so that they can heal you of the death inside you so that you can end prophecy and end the threat to the world of life now that the barrier is down.”

— Terry Goodkind

300. “Emotions are the end result, the sum, of things learned.”

— Terry Goodkind