Top 120 Neil Strauss Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Besides, most bystanders who see you approach a girl or a group assume that you know the people. So act like you do. Not only will it ease your worries about what everyone else is thinking, but it’ll also make your approach more effective.”

— Neil Strauss

102. “Men are a hundred times worse than you can imagine. We are thinking the worst, shallowest thoughts, all the time.”

— Neil Strauss

103. “I think the existential dilemma is: We’re social animals, so we all wrestle with a sense of inadequacy. But when we realize that we’re not as inadequate as we thought we were, and when we realize that everybody else also thinks they’re inadequate, then that ache goes away and the idea that we’re not a person of value disappears to some extent.”

— Neil Strauss

104. “To survive painful beliefs and feelings, we often mask them with anger. That way, we don’t have to feel the shame behind it.”

— Neil Strauss

105. “He asked her what she was famous for – “everybody’s famous for something.”

— Neil Strauss

106. “In life, we are born innocent and pure, beautiful and honest, and in a state of oneness with each moment. As we develop, however, our caregivers and others load us with baggage. Some of us keep accumulating more and more baggage until we become burdened by all the weight, trapped in beliefs and behaviors that keep us stuck. But the true purpose of life is to divest yourself of that baggage and become light and pure again. You’ve been searching for freedom this whole time. That is true freedom.”

— Neil Strauss

107. “I idealized a lifestyle and behavior that were corrupt,” he explained. “I abhorred kindness, mercy, human dignity, and intimacy. Instead, I used, degraded, and exploited women. I thought only about my pleasure. I despised the good instincts within me and within others, and attempted to corrupt anyone I met.” As.”

— Neil Strauss

108. “One of the reasons I became a writer is that, unlike starting a band, directing movies, or acting in a theatrical production, you can do it alone. Your success and failure depend entirely on yourself.”

— Neil Strauss

109. “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.”

— Neil Strauss

110. “Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world.”

— Neil Strauss

111. “Death is a guillotine blade hanging over our heads, reminding us every second of every day that this life we treasure so much is no more important to the universe than those of the two hundred thousand insects each of us kills with the front of our car every year.”

— Neil Strauss

112. “I’ve seen rock stars agonize over the fact that another artist has far more Facebook ‘likes’ and Twitter followers than they do.”

— Neil Strauss

113. “The days and nights spent imprisoned in her house doing nothing were getting to me. I refuse to take time for granted. One.”

— Neil Strauss

114. “As I walked back to my room, a scene from The Wizard of Oz sprung into my head in which the Wizard tells the Tin Man, “A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others.” I.”

— Neil Strauss

115. “Relationships are like divining rods for locating one’s faults and weaknesses.”

— Neil Strauss

116. “All the things you’ve been trying to get from these relationships – freedom, understanding, fairness, acceptance – are exactly the things that you never got from your mom. So every time you load all that unfinished business onto your partner, you’re setting yourself up for another disappointment. Because as an adult, the only person who can give you those things is you.”

— Neil Strauss

117. “So if drug addicts go to rehab and the violent go to anger management class, then social retards go to pickup school.”

— Neil Strauss

118. “I think there are just a million interviews in anthologies with famous musicians that are about the music, and they’re really boring to read.”

— Neil Strauss

119. “There’s an unconscious part of ourselves we want to defend,” she continues, “and it’s been useful and helped us survive the difficult stuff we went through with Mom or Dad or the priest or the coach. But we don’t want it driving the car anymore.” She looks at me and Troy and Adam and Calvin, then concludes: “Life’s not worth living if you’re living someone else’s life.”

— Neil Strauss

120. “When I look down at my pale, skinny body, I wonder why any woman would want to sleep next to it, let alone embrace it.”

— Neil Strauss

121. “In the dance of infatuation, we see others not as they are, but as projections of who we want them to be. And we impose on them all the imaginary criteria we think will fill the void in our hearts.”

— Neil Strauss

122. “Your intention for a book is never the same as the reception.”

— Neil Strauss

123. “Here,” he said. “I brought this for you.” It was a small hardcover edition of an eighteenth century book called The Path of the Just with a note he had written for me inscribed on the title page. It quoted the Talmud: Whoever destroys a single life is as guilty as though he had destroyed the entire world; and whoever rescues a single life earns as much merit as though he had rescued the entire world. So he was trying to save me. Why? I was having fun.”

— Neil Strauss

124. “We ran around the party asking everyone for their opinion on having wallabies as pets. Between the opener and my shirt, within a half hour we were surrounded by women.”

— Neil Strauss

125. “Most people seem to believe that if a relationship doesn’t last until death, it’s a failure. But the only relationship that’s truly a failure is one that lasts longe than it should. The success of a relationship should be measured by it’s depth, not by it’s lenght.”

— Neil Strauss

126. “He spread out in his chair like a melting shard of Swiss cheese and informed us: “The only lies I’ll ever tell are: ‘I won’t come in your mouth’ and ‘I’ll just rub it around your ass.’” It wasn’t a pretty visual.”

— Neil Strauss

127. “But I couldn’t commit to the time. I needed to resuscitate my career.”

— Neil Strauss

128. “But now, everything I once thought I liked about myself has been turned into a symptom of something wrong with me. I’m told over and over by addiction experts not to trust anything I say, think, or feel. They tell me I need to build self-esteem from within. Yet in order to do that, I have to accept that I’m broken, shattered, stigmatized, diseased, and traumatized – and all that does is make me want to throw myself off a rooftop so I can start all over again.”

— Neil Strauss

129. “I feel like rock stars feel a sense of entitlement, whereas I just feel a sense of good fortune.”

— Neil Strauss

130. “Whenever people idealize their caretakers, chances are pretty good that the opposite is true. Sometimes illusion is created by the parents, who insists in godlike fashion that they’re perfect and that the child owes them obedience because they’re responsible for his or her existence. Other times the illusion is created by the child as a survival strategy, disconnecting from reality in order to avoid the pain of growing up in a toxic enviroment.”

— Neil Strauss

131. “In this life, we don’t meet many people who truly love us, who accept us for who we are, who put us before themselves.”

— Neil Strauss

132. “A lot of times, people in a family think it’s just one person who causes all the trouble,” Lorraine, the therapist who lectured us on trauma, is telling the assembly. “But a family is a system, and a sick person is the product of a sick system.”

— Neil Strauss

133. “We talked for a half hour, and they supplicated to me the whole time.”

— Neil Strauss

134. “All the things you’ve been trying to get from these relationships – freedom, understanding, fairness, acceptance – are exactly the things that you never got from your mom.”

— Neil Strauss

135. “His weapon is his voice. After years of studying everyone from master hypnotists to Hawaiian Kahunas, he claims to have found the technology – and make no mistake about it, that’s what it is – that will turn any responsive woman into a libidinous puddle. Jeffries, who claims to be the inspiration for Tom Cruise’s character in Magnolia, calls it Speed Seduction. Jeffries.”

— Neil Strauss

136. “He was validated. She was validated. They validated each other. They were a perfect pair, each completely unaware of the other. At.”

— Neil Strauss

137. “Fame won’t make you feel any better about yourself.”

— Neil Strauss

138. “She’s still making me go over every detail of the affair. And, you know, whenever I check my email, everything’s in the read folder because she’s already gone through it all.” “That’s a horrible way to live – for you and for her. You know what Lorraine calls it?” “No.” “Pain shopping. She’s not getting healed by that. She’s just getting retraumatized.”

— Neil Strauss

139. “Any time you tell yourself you “can’t” do something that’s within the realm of human possibility – that’s a limiting belief.”

— Neil Strauss