Niels Bohr — "The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life…"
The meaning of life consists in the fact that it makes no sense to say that life has no meaning.
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More from Niels Bohr
"The electron is not a 'thing' in the usual sense of the word. It is a system of relationships."
"It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature."
"We are suspended in language. Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others."
"Physics is not about how the world is, it is about what we can say about the world."
"If we would understand the atom, we must be able to describe it in its totality, and not merely in its parts."
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Understanding this quote
What it means
Life's meaning cannot be negated by declaring it meaningless — the very act of questioning meaning presupposes that meaning matters. To say life is meaningless is itself a meaningful statement, which undermines the claim. Life doesn't need external justification; the search for meaning is woven into existence itself, making the absence of meaning logically self-defeating.
Relevance to Niels Bohr
Bohr built his career on paradox and complementarity — the idea that contradictory descriptions can both be true, as with light being both wave and particle. This quote mirrors his quantum worldview: meaning and meaninglessness are not opposites but complementary aspects. Bohr famously wrestled with deep philosophical questions about observation and reality, making existential paradox as natural to him as physics.
The era
Bohr lived through two World Wars, the rise of nihilism, and existentialist philosophy challenging traditional meaning-systems. Figures like Sartre declared existence precedes essence; Camus wrestled with absurdity. Simultaneously, quantum mechanics was dismantling deterministic certainty. In this climate of philosophical and scientific upheaval, asserting that meaninglessness is self-refuting offered a grounded, logically coherent counter to spreading nihilism.
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