A thousand ways lead through the jungle to a thousand goals, and no goal is the final one; with each step new expanses open.

From My Belief: Essays on Life and Art, a collection of essays by Hermann Hesse.  The Magic of the Book is an essay from 1930.  

And each year we see thousands and thousands of children entering the first class, drawing their first letters, deciphering the first syllables, and we see again and again that for a majority of these children the ability to read quickly becomes an ordinary matter of little value, while others from year to year and decade to decade become more and more enchanted and astounded by the use they can make of the magic key that school gave them. For if today the ability to read is everyone's portion, still only a few notice what a powerful talisman has thus been put into their hands. The child proud of his youthful knowledge of the alphabet first achieves for himself the reading of a verse or a saying, then the reading of a first little story, a fairy tale, and while those who have not been called seem to apply their reading ability to news reports or to the business sections of their newspapers, there are a few who remain constantly bewitched by the strange miracle of letters and words (which once, to be sure, were an enchantment and magic formula to everyone). From these few come the readers. They discover as children a few poems and stories, a verse by Claudius, or a tale by Hebel or Hauff in the reader, and instead of turning their backs on these things after acquiring the ability to read they press forward into the realm of books and discover step by step how vast, how various and blessed this world is! At first they took this world for a little child’s pretty garden with a tulip bed and a little fish pond; now the garden becomes a park, it becomes a landscape, a section of the earth, the world, it becomes Paradise and the Ivory Coast, it entices with constantly new enchantments, blooms in ever-new colors. And what yesterday appeared to be a garden or a park or a jungle, today or tomorrow is recognized as a temple, a temple with a thousand halls and courtyards in which the spirit of all nations and times is present, constantly waiting for reawakening, ever ready, to recognize the many-voiced multiplicity of its phenomena as a unity. And for every true reader this endless world of books looks different, everyone seeks and recognizes himself in it. One gropes his way from children’s tales and books about Indians to Shakespeare or Dante, another from the first schoolbook essay about the starry heavens to Kepler or to Einstein, a third from a pious child’s prayer to the holy cool vaults of Saint Thomas or Saint Bonaventure, or to the sublime complexities of Talmudic thought, or to the springlike similes of the Upanishads, to the moving wisdom of the Hasidim, or to the lapidary and yet so friendly, so genial and merry teachings of ancient China. A thousand ways lead through the jungle to a thousand goals, and no goal is the final one; with each step new expanses open.