Top 100 Charles Martin Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Words that soak into your ears are whispered, not yelled.”

— Charles Martin

2. “No matter where you go, no matter whether you succeed or fail, stand or fall, no gone is too far gone. You can always come home.”

— Charles Martin

3. “Never judge someone by their relatives.”

— Charles Martin

4. “When we’re down and the momentum is stacked against us. Those are the moments when we find out what we’re made of. When we learn to trust and lean on each other.”

— Charles Martin

5. “Marry the man who’s going to walk with you through the next fifty or sixty years. Open doors, hold your hand, make your coffee, rub lotion on the cracks of your feet, put you up on a pedestal where you belong. Is he marrying your face and your bottle-blond hair, or will he love you when you look like whoever you’re going to look like in fifty years?”

— Charles Martin

6. “The only monster you need to worry about in this life is the one that stares at you from the mirror each morning. You tame him, make friends with him, and the rest of life is nothing you can’t handle.”

— Charles Martin

7. “Stripped bare, the human soul has one real desire: to know and be known.”

— Charles Martin

8. “Life is a series of hellos and goodbyes. This... is goodbye. But not out last hello.”

— Charles Martin

9. “It’s complicated.” “Yeah? Welcome to Earth. Everything here is complicated.”

— Charles Martin

10. “Waiting for somebody does that. It turns minutes to hours, hours to days, and days to several lifetimes.”

— Charles Martin

11. “But words are like bullets. Once they exit the barrel, it’s impossible to bring them back.”

— Charles Martin

12. “Reese, your books might not tell you this, so I will. Every heart has two parts, the part that pumps and the part that loves. If you’re going to spend your life fixing broken hearts, then learn about both. You can’t just fix one with no concern for the other.”

— Charles Martin

13. “Augustine said it best: You stir man to take pleasure in praising You, because You have made us for Yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in You.”

— Charles Martin

14. “Love has its own communication. It’s the language of the heart, while it has never been transcribed, has no alphabet, and can’t be heard or spoken by voice, it is used by every human on the planet. It is written on our souls, scripted by the finger of God, and we can hear, understand, and speak it with perfection long before we open our eyes for the first time.”

— Charles Martin

15. “Maybe piecing is continual. Maybe the glue takes time to dry. Maybe bones take time to mend. Maybe it’s okay that the mess I call me is in process. Maybe it’s a long, hard walk out of the crash site. Maybe the distance is different for each of us. Maybe love is bigger than my mess.”

— Charles Martin

16. “Music is a gift. We make it to give it away.”

— Charles Martin

17. “Puzzles forced me to look at something from several angles before I moved on, to look again, and again, and possibly again because each piece – no matter how small or seemingly insignificant – was critical to the whole.”

— Charles Martin

18. “Pain is weakness leaving your body.”

— Charles Martin

19. “This side of the grave, no one – and I don’t care who they are or what sin or sins they have or are committing – is too far gone.”

— Charles Martin

20. “If God can make a firefly’s butt light up like a star, then anything is possible. Anything.”

— Charles Martin

21. “Just because something is broken doesn’t mean it’s no good. Doesn’t mean you throw it away. It just means it’s broken, and broken is okay. I wanted to tell her that broken is still beautiful, still works, still wakes me in the morning, and at the end of every day past and those to come, I can love broken.”

— Charles Martin

22. “Touch my lips with the burning coal, light me, and let it rain.”

— Charles Martin

23. “My life had been characterized by emptiness the size of the Sahara but there, in that moment, in the back of that truck in the armpit of Nicaragua, I wondered – for the first time – if there wasn’t a river flowing down deep inside me. If so, the water that would cleanse me was not water from my head – where I’d learned to rationalize my indifference. But water from my heart.”

— Charles Martin

24. “Forgiveness offered -especially when so undeserved – cuts chains off the human heart that no other power in any universe anywhere can rattle much less break... love did what hatred can not and never will.”

— Charles Martin

25. “Hate is a powerful weapon. But it is powerless when it comes to cutting chains off the human heart.”

— Charles Martin

26. “This is love with legs.’ My father used to say that you can tell someone you love them until you’re blue in the face, but until they see that walked out, they have no idea what it means. Hence, ‘love with legs.’” A wide smile spread across her face. “Every day he’d climb out.”

— Charles Martin

27. “Hope is not the result of medicine or anything that science has to offer. It is a flower that sprouts and grows when others pour water upon it. I think sometimes that I spent so much time worrying about how to protect and strengthen the flower – even going so far as to graft in a new stem and root system – that I forgot to simply water it.”

— Charles Martin

28. “Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.”

— Charles Martin

29. “While her emotions were very real and they gnawed at her with a raw sincerity, she was listening to something deeper. She was listening to her will, not letting what she felt dictate what she would do. Didn’t let it dictate her life.”

— Charles Martin

30. “You take the bad with the good, Rise up through it. Live in the mist of it. It’s the bad that lets you know ho good the good really is. Don’t let the bad leave you thinking like there ain’t any good. There is, and lots of it, too.”

— Charles Martin

31. “The only true language in the world is a kiss... When the pleasure is simple and complete... in the offering.”

— Charles Martin

32. “Sometimes the most courageous thing a man can do is run back across the battlefield and rescue the wounded.”

— Charles Martin

33. “Don’t let the fear of what might be rob you of the promise of what can.”

— Charles Martin

34. “If the worst is a possibility, then you keep it on the table. Don’t hide from it. Don’t run. It can happen. And if and when it does, you need to have thought about it ahead of time. That way you’re not crushed when your worst thought becomes your reality.”

— Charles Martin

35. “I’m one half of a two-piece puzzle.”

— Charles Martin

36. “The heart is not only the most unselfish of organs, it is also the most courageous and faithful.”

— Charles Martin

37. “I had to let her go. She’s not coming back. The distance is too great. The mountain between us is the one mountain I cannot climb.”

— Charles Martin

38. “We’re all broken, all walk with a limp. Here is the truth about you and me: even when in a far-off country, wasted life, stripped bare, smeared, squandered, nothing but scar tissue and shameful, self-inflicted wounds, the love of the Father finds the son and daughter.”

— Charles Martin

39. “You know sometimes when I walk into your room with a flashlight or a candle?′ I nodded. ‘Well, love is like that. Light doesn’t have to announce it’s way into a room or ask the darkness to leave. It just is. It walks ahead of you, and the darkness rolls back like a tide.’ She waved her hand across the room. ‘It has to ’cause darkness can’t be where light is.”

— Charles Martin

40. “Time to paint your but white and run with antelope-in English- Stop arguing and do as your told.”

— Charles Martin

41. “Love is an amazing thing. It takes the brokenness, the scars, the pain, the darkness, everything, and makes it all new.”

— Charles Martin

42. “I sat in that room and realized that you can cut off a finger, cut off a hand, even cut off a leg, but if you take a woman’s breast, you are cutting more than just a body part.”

— Charles Martin

43. “Since that moment, I’d bought into the idea that isolation would ease my pain and indifference was the remedy for rejection. Clarity was quick in coming. Isolation is a prison and indifference is a lie. Neither work.”

— Charles Martin

44. “You put a new heart in Emma a long time ago, it just wasn’t the kind you were thinking of.” He laughed to himself. “Hope is an amazing thing. I saw it in Emma, saw it with my own eyes.”

— Charles Martin

45. “Love is a choice. It’s a decision.′ She told us, ‘It flows into, through, and out of each person like a river. If you try to stop it, it’ll sneak around until It finds another heart and breaks through.”

— Charles Martin

46. “Sometimes I think that hell is two places: it’s a place you end up, but it’s also a place that you live before you get there. I don’t know if the devil’s got horns and a spear for a tail, but I don’t think that’s the point. The point is that hell is separate from love. If Lucifer knows anything, he knows that. And ever since Emma left, I’d known the same thing. It’s a lonely, desolate place.”

— Charles Martin

47. “Most people enter a library and don’t hear a thing. Eerie silence. I stand between the shelves and hear ten thousand conversations occurring all at once. Each ushering an invitation. The noise is raucous.”

— Charles Martin

48. “This whole exchange is better when two people do it. it’s called ‘kissing’. It’s when your lips speak what your heart feels. Or have you forgotten how? I laughed. I might have. It’s been a long time.”

— Charles Martin

49. “Granted, there are a lot of folks whose fires die out, I get that, but I also think there are a lot of couples out there who have been married thirty, forty, fifty years that know a whole lot more about the loving part of marriage than we give them credit for. We think we’re young, we’ve got the monopoly on passion.” I shook my head. “Not so sure. They might give Dr. Phil a run for his money.”

— Charles Martin

50. “A song is a light we shine on others, not a light we shine on us.”

— Charles Martin