Top 120 Neil Strauss Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Alcohol has never caused anyone to do something they didn’t want to do. It only enables them to do what they’ve always wanted but have instead repressed.”

— Neil Strauss

52. “My ex-girlfriend Lisa once said that every woman wants the same thing in a relationship: to be adored.”

— Neil Strauss

53. “We have this idea that love is supposed to last forever. But love isn’t like that. It’s a free-flowing energy that comes and goes when it pleases. Sometimes it stays for life; other times it stays for a second, a day, a month, or a year. So don’t fear love when it comes simply because it makes you vulnerable. But don’t be surprised when it leaves, either. Just be glad you had the opportunity to experience it.”

— Neil Strauss

54. “Loneliness is holding in a joke because you have no one to share it with.”

— Neil Strauss

55. “A pickup artist must be the exception to the rule. You must not do what everyone else does. Ever.”

— Neil Strauss

56. “Fear makes you docile.”

— Neil Strauss

57. “Every word, every step, every action is irreversible. If we step in front of a moving car, if we sign a contract we haven’t read, if we betray the person we love, the best we can do is try to clean up the mess. But no matter how hard we scrub, the stain on reality will never come out. The word you just read can never be unread.”

— Neil Strauss

58. “They say that love is blind, but it’s trauma that’s blind. Love sees what is.”

— Neil Strauss

59. “Lying is about controlling someone else’s reality, hoping that what they don’t know won’t hurt you.”

— Neil Strauss

60. “Every problem had a solution; every dispute had a compromise; every ego had a way to be stroked.”

— Neil Strauss

61. “We’re just fragile machines programmed with a false sense of our own importance. And every now and then the universe sends a reminder that we don’t really matter to it...”

— Neil Strauss

62. “After an hour of blather, I started to understand Tyler Durden. Human interaction to him was a program. Behavior was determined by frames and congruence and state and validation and other big-chunk psychological principles. And he wanted to be the Wizard of Oz: the little guy behind the curtain, pulling the strings that made everyone around him think he was a big and powerful master of the realm. I.”

— Neil Strauss

63. “Never underestimate your own capacity to care.”

— Neil Strauss

64. “He was a flower that bloomed with attention – be it positive or negative – and wilted when ignored. Peacock theory wasn’t just to attract girls.”

— Neil Strauss

65. “While I am impulsive in many areas of my life, marriage is not one of them.”

— Neil Strauss

66. “In fairy tales, love strikes like lightning. In real life, lightning burns. It can even kill you.”

— Neil Strauss

67. “Besides confidence and a smile, we learned, the other characteristics of an alpha male were being well-groomed, possessing a sense of humor, connecting with people, and being seen as the social center of a room.”

— Neil Strauss

68. “Rather than having actual freedom, it seemed that, like animals in a habitat in the zoo, we had only the illusion of freedom. As long as we didn’t try to leave the cage, we’d never know we weren’t actually free.”

— Neil Strauss

69. “Instead of putting others down, try improving yourself instead. The only person you have a right to compete with is you.”

— Neil Strauss

70. “The underlying cause of most unfulfilled lives is that we are simply too close to ourselves to see clearly enough to get out of our own way.”

— Neil Strauss

71. “The secret to life is not to take it personally. The things people do and say are not always.”

— Neil Strauss

72. “How will I know the difference?” “Wounds bring drama and trauma. They don’t bring comfort.”

— Neil Strauss

73. “I’ve begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.”

— Neil Strauss

74. “I always wanted to interview Michael Jackson, because I just wanted to humanize him.”

— Neil Strauss

75. “Dog Training by Lew Burke.”

— Neil Strauss

76. “Our Society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of. It’s an inevitability tourists can’t help but realize when visiting Mayan ruins, Egyptian ruins, Roman ruins. How long will it be before someone is visiting American ruins?”

— Neil Strauss

77. “Then let me ask you” – here it comes, the verbal aikido that will use my words to topple my beliefs – “is it possible to live your authentic life if you have inauthentic people around you?”

— Neil Strauss

78. “Men are not dogs. We merely think we are and, on occasion, act as if we are. But, by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it. This is one reason why men tend to fear commitment – and sometimes, as in Mystery’s case, even rebel against it by endeavoring to bring out the worst in a woman.”

— Neil Strauss

79. “Because, all too often, the things that we’re the most resistant to are precisely what we need. And the things we’re most scared to let go of are exactly the ones we most need to relinquish.”

— Neil Strauss

80. “Most robots don’t program themselves.”

— Neil Strauss

81. “You need to be careful with a Bluetooth headset. Because some guys look crazy with them.”

— Neil Strauss

82. “Using words like “casual” and “hang out,” and the time constraint, were all part of a strategy to make the visit a low-pressure event. It’s a much better way to get someone to commit to time with a stranger than AFC-style dinner dating, which can be a painful, drawn-out affair that involves two people who may have nothing in common stuck together for an entire night of awkward conversation.”

— Neil Strauss

83. “That’s the inner me,” he admitted. “Inside I sometimes feel pathetic, awkward, and unloved.” “Even after all the confidence you acquired as a pickup artist, a husband, and a father?” “Well,” he said, opening the door to his car, “all you can do is put on an appearance of confidence sometimes. And after a while, others will start to believe it.” He grabbed the door handle to pull it closed. “And then you die.” Slam.”

— Neil Strauss

84. “Life is a learned skill, but instead of teaching it, our culture force-fills developing minds with long division and capital cities – until, at the end of the mandatory period of bondage that’s hyperbolically called school, we’re sent into the world knowing little about it. And so, left on our own to figure out the most important parts of life, we make mistakes for years until, by the time we’ve learned enough from our stumbling to be effective human beings, it’s time for us to die.”

— Neil Strauss

85. “I used to think that a good relationship meant always getting along. But the secret, I realize, is that when one person shuts down or throws a fit, the other needs to stay in the adult ego state. If both people descend to the wounded child or adapted adolescent, that’s when all forces of relationship drama and destruction are unleashed.”

— Neil Strauss

86. “He’d been so neglected as a child that the withdrawal of love pulled all his emotional triggers, exploding the carapace of narcissism built by his childhood escapism. As.”

— Neil Strauss

87. “It was a completely pointless ambition, with no practical application whatsoever. But if you sit the average male down in front of anything halfway intriguing and explain to him that it has a system of rankings that he can get better at over time, he’ll become obsessed. Hence the popularity of video games, martial arts, Dungeons and Dragons, and the seduction community. I.”

— Neil Strauss

88. “I’ve noticed a pattern in stars that start acting out in public. Every one of them felt like they grew up without love.”

— Neil Strauss

89. “The person who is too smart to love is truly an idiot.”

— Neil Strauss

90. “It’s tragic. The wounds that humans get are so strong that they’re like robots operating on childhood programming. And even if they learn the truth about themselves in therapy and rehab, they still cling to their false beliefs and make choices that don’t serve them – over and over again.” He shakes his head at the cosmic absurdity of it all. “It takes hard, conscious, diligent work to genuinely change.”

— Neil Strauss

91. “When it comes to meeting and attracting women, many men are resigned and complacent. We figure some guys were born with that particular power and other guys weren’t. I wasn’t.”

— Neil Strauss

92. “As anyone who regularly reads newspapers or true-crime books knows, a significant percentage of violent crime, from kidnappings to shooting sprees, is the result of the frustrated sexual impulses and desires of males. By socializing guys like Sasha, Mystery and I were making the world a safer place.”

— Neil Strauss

93. “You will speed up your growth by being selfish. So imagine that the people you’re looking at can actually take care of themselves. And if you ask for what you want and trust that the other person will say yes or no powerfully, it will make things very interesting.”

— Neil Strauss

94. “For most men, what’s tougher than breaking up is the moment when their ex finally falls out of love with them and lets go, perhaps because it triggers a childhood fear – a psychological terror – of losing the first woman whose love they needed: their mother. And so, as Sheila would recommend, I let myself feel the pain, the loneliness, and the fear, using all my strength as the days pass to keep from giving in and reaching out to Ingrid.”

— Neil Strauss

95. “Almost everyone who reaches a plateau where he or she is happy and comfortable says its because of finding balance between work, relaxation, exercise, socialising and family – plus some alone time to do something contemplative, creative, or educational.”

— Neil Strauss

96. “2. As long as at least one partner is in the adult functional at any given time, most – if not all – arguments can be avoided.”

— Neil Strauss

97. “Intimacy is sharing your reality with someone else and knowing you’re safe, and them being able to share their reality with you and also be safe.”

— Neil Strauss

98. “Love is a cage only when you feel indebted to it, constrained by it, responsible to its owner.”

— Neil Strauss

99. “The problem many people have is that the exact quality that originally attracted them to their partner becomes a threat once a serious relationship begins.”

— Neil Strauss

100. “I think my love is storytelling. No matter what it is, it’s storytelling. And so whatever the medium is, what’s right for the story, I enjoy doing it.”

— Neil Strauss