Love Quote by John Gay

Desire, John Gay suggests, is a skittish animal: chase it and it bolts; turn your back and it pads after you. The line works because it refuses the sentimental fantasy that love is rewarded by effort. Instead, it frames romance as a dance of attention and scarcity, where eagerness reads as neediness and neediness kills the mood. The couplet-like balance (follow/flee, flee/follow) gives the thought the click of a proverb, as if this were less a bitter observation than a natural law. That neat symmetry is the trap: it sounds like wisdom you can apply, even though it describes an emotional economy that’s irrational by design.

Gay wrote in an early 18th-century world of manners, flirtation, and social performance, where courtship was rarely “authentic” in the modern sense and often tangled with status, property, and reputation. In that setting, the quote doubles as strategy. Don’t display too much longing; cultivate indifference; let the other party supply the pursuit. It’s a remarkably modern prescription for the marketplace dynamics of affection: attention is currency, and overspending devalues you.

The subtext is also quietly cynical about agency. If love follows only when you flee, then sincerity becomes self-sabotage, and intimacy gets built on misdirection. Gay isn’t celebrating manipulation so much as documenting a society where people learn to treat feeling like negotiation. The wit is that he makes a romantic truth sound like a hunting tip, reducing the grandest emotion to a reflex: approach and it startles, retreat and it stalks you.