"To destroy cities, either materially or morally, . . . this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the universe. . . ."

"Mais détruire des cités, soit matériellement, soit moralement, . . . c'est couper tout lien de poésie et d'amour entre des âmes humaines et l'univers."

     Simone Weil, "Love of the order of the world," in "Forms of the implicit love of God," in Waiting on God, trans. Emma Craufurd (London:  Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd., 1951), 115-116, italics mine.  Context:

The love of the beauty of the world, while it is universal, involves, as a love which is secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things which bad fortune can destroy.  The truly precious things [('the pure and authentic achievements of art and science', 'everything which envelops human life with poetry through all the social strata')] are those which form ladders [(échelles)] reaching towards the beauty of the world, openings [(ouvertures)] on to it.  He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.

French from Œuvres, ed. Florence de Lussy (Paris:  Le Grand Livre du Mois < Éditions Gallimard, 1999), 744.