Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.

This remark is generally traced to Flaubert’s correspondence, where he often reflects on the discipline required for artistic creation. In letters from the 1850s—when he was living in relative seclusion and laboring obsessively over prose style (notably during the long composition of *Madame Bovary*)—Flaubert repeatedly contrasts the writer’s outward life with the inner demands of art. He cultivated strict routines and a deliberately “bourgeois” regularity (steady habits, controlled surroundings) as a way to conserve energy for the strenuous, transgressive work of invention and style. The line encapsulates his belief that artistic radicalism is enabled by personal self-regulation rather than bohemian disorder.

The quote draws a deliberate paradox: the artist may need bourgeois regularity in life to achieve radical originality in art. “Bourgeois” here is less praise than a provocation—Flaubert suggests that self-discipline, stability, and control of one’s habits can function as a protective container for creative extremity. By separating life from work, the writer avoids dissipating energy in performative bohemianism and instead concentrates intensity where it matters: in the crafted sentence, the daring image, the uncompromising vision. It also implies that artistic “violence” (force, rupture, invention) is not spontaneous chaos but the product of sustained, methodical labor.