Hermann Hesse Quote
He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces.
He read the veinings of a leaf, the pattern on a mushroom cap, and divined mysteries, relations, futures, possibilities: the magic of symbols, the foreshadowing of numbers and writing, the reduction of infinitudes and multiplicities to simplicity, to system, to concept. For all these ways of comprehending the world through the mind no doubt lay within him, nameless, unnamed, but not inconceivable, not beyond the bounds of presentiment, still in the germ, but essential to his nature, part of him, growing organically within him. And if we were to go still further back beyond this Rainmaker and his time which to us seems so early and primitive, if we were to go several thousand years further back into the past, wherever we found man we would still find - this is our firm belief - the mind of man, that mind which has no beginning and always has contained everything that it later produces.
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About Hermann Hesse
Hesse was born in 1877 in Calw, a town in Germany's Northern Black Forest. His father was a Baltic German and his grandmother had French-Swiss roots. As a child, he shared a passion for poetry and music with his mother, and was well-read and cultured, due in part to the influence of his polyglot grandfather.
As a youth, he studied briefly at a Protestant boarding school, the Evangelical Seminaries of Maulbronn and Blaubeuren, where he struggled with bouts of depression and once attempted suicide, which temporarily landed him in a sanatorium. Hesse completed Gymnasium and passed his examinations in 1893, when his formal education ended. An autodidact, Hesse read theological treatises, Greek mythology, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Nietzsche after his formal education concluded. His first works of poetry and prose were being published in the 1890s and early 1900s with his first novel, Peter Camenzind, appearing in 1904.