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There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.
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“There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion.”

Edgar Allan Poe

Source
The Masque of the Red Death
Date
1842
Meaning

Meaning of “There are chords in the hearts of the…”

Poe’s narrator suggests that even people who treat danger and death as entertainment retain emotional limits beyond which mockery turns into genuine horror.

Source context

Where does it come from?

The Masque of the Red Death, Project Gutenberg #1064. The sentence appears as the masked figure violates even Prince Prospero’s extreme masquerade conventions by embodying the Red Death; it is Gothic narration inside fiction, not a psychological law.

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DeepFearHumanityLifeShortThought-Provoking Quotes That Invite ReflectionDeathPerspective
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To live in hearts we leave behind, Is not to die.
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“To live in hearts we leave behind, Is not to die.”

Thomas Campbell · Hallowed Ground · 1825
Meaning & context

Campbell suggests that a person’s influence can continue through the memories and moral lives of others even after biological death.

Source details

“Hallowed Ground,” represented in The Poetical Works of Thomas Campbell, Project Gutenberg #59788. The stanza reflects on memory, public service, death and what makes ground or remembrance sacred.

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They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.
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“They come weeping and go weeping—you only come laughing and go laughing.”

Kahlil Gibran · The Madman · 1918
Meaning & context

The grave-digger’s observation uses dark humor to contrast conventional responses to death with a narrator who approaches the cemetery from another perspective.

Source details

The Madman, “The Grave-Digger”; the line is spoken by the grave-digger to the narrator.

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We live, as we dream—alone.
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“We live, as we dream—alone.”

Joseph Conrad · Heart of Darkness · 1899
Meaning & context

Marlow describes the difficulty of transferring the full inner texture of experience to another person, suggesting that some dimensions of consciousness remain irreducibly private.

Source details

Heart of Darkness, Part I, Project Gutenberg #219. Marlow says ‘We live, as we dream—alone’ while explaining to his listeners that the lived ‘life-sensation’ of an earlier period cannot be fully conveyed to another person. The line remains fictional narration inside Conrad's colonial-era novella rather than a clinical or universal psychological finding about loneliness.

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There is no Wealth but Life.
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“There is no Wealth but Life.”

John Ruskin · Unto This Last and Other Essays on Political Economy · 1862
Meaning & context

Ruskin makes human life and its capacities the final measure of wealth, challenging definitions that treat accumulated money or goods as sufficient evidence of national well-being.

Source details

Unto This Last, fourth essay, first published in Cornhill Magazine in 1860 and collected in book form in 1862; Project Gutenberg #36541. This is Ruskin’s normative political-economy argument, not a modern empirical wealth metric.

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What am I? A part of the infinite.
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“What am I? A part of the infinite.”

Leo Tolstoy · My Confession · 1882
Meaning & context

Tolstoy frames the self as finite yet participating in something larger, shifting the question of meaning away from isolated individual duration toward a relation with the infinite.

Source details

My Confession, Leo Wiener translation; the question appears in Tolstoy’s investigation of how finite human life might be related to an infinite reality.

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You and I are but sewing-machines.
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“You and I are but sewing-machines.”

Mark Twain · What Is Man? · 1906
Voice: Dialogue speaker · Old Man
Meaning & context

The comic comparison reduces human pride by placing ordinary people beside the much richer creative machinery Twain has just attributed to Shakespeare.

Source details

What Is Man?, Part I, “a. Man the Machine. b. Personal Merit,” Project Gutenberg #70. The Old Man says “You and I are but sewing-machines” immediately after contrasting Shakespeare with a Gobelin loom and before insisting that people merely turn out what their inherited and external influences permit. This remains Twain’s comic-philosophical deterministic dialogue, not settled psychology or neuroscience.