The countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.

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.  

But even if a reader acquires no new language, or for that matter does not even acquaint himself with some new or hitherto unknown literature, he can endlessly go on with his reading, making finer distinctions, heightening, strengthening. For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face to the reader every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. When as a youth I read for the first time, only partially understanding it, Goethe’s Elective Affinities, that was a completely different book from the Elective Affinities that I have now read perhaps for the fifth time! The great and mysterious thing about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations and see that all beauty, all charm depend on this individuality and uniqueness—at the same time we come to realize ever more clearly how all these hundred thousand voices of nations strive toward the same goals, call upon the same gods by different names, dream the same wishes, suffer the same sorrows. Out of the thousandfold fabric of countless languages and books of several thousand years, in ecstatic instants there stares at the reader a marvelously noble and transcendent chimera: the countenance of humanity, charmed into unity from a thousand contradictory features.