“What the sorrowful Jew of Amsterdam called the essence of a thing, the effort that it makes to persist indefinitely in its own being, self-love, the longing for immortality, is it not perhaps the primal and fundamental condition of all reflective or human knowledge? And is it not therefore the true base, the real starting-point, of all philosophy, although the philosophers, perverted by intellectualism, do not recognize it?”

—  Miguel de Unamuno

The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), II : The Starting-Point

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Miguel de Unamuno 199
19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher 1864–1936

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