Science Quote by Alexis Carrel

Carrel frames jealousy less as a private vice than as a biological offense: not merely wrong, but illegal under the "laws of life". That move matters. Coming from a scientist, the sentence borrows the authority of natural law to moralize an emotion, smuggling an ethical verdict inside what sounds like a clinical diagnosis. Jealousy isn't debated; it's disqualified. The pairing with hatred tightens the vise. Hatred is the obvious villain, so jealousy is guilt-by-association, upgraded from petty insecurity to existential threat.

The rhetoric is antiseptic and absolutist. "Forbidden" suggests an external order that precedes choice, while "essentially destructive" implies jealousy has a single core function: to erode. It's a neat, severe compression, the kind of line that works because it offers relief from ambiguity. If jealousy is inherently ruinous, you don't need to parse its causes, its social triggers, or its occasional usefulness as a signal of neglected needs. You can treat it like a toxin.

Context sharpens the edge. Carrel wrote in an era intoxicated with sorting human behavior into hygienic and unhygienic categories, when "life" was often invoked as a standard to justify social prescriptions. His own history includes troubling entanglements with eugenic thinking, which makes the phrase "laws of life" feel less neutral than it sounds. The subtext isn't only "don't be jealous"; it's "the healthy person, the fit society, expels corrosive feelings". The line’s power is its scientific tone, and its risk is the same: it turns messy human experience into a moralized pathology.