A little more than a decade ago, pick-up artists were starting to move from the underground to the mainstream and I ran across the work of two of the Godfathers of the movement, Neil Strauss and Erik Von Markovik (Mystery). I read their books, read some of their online material and even got a chance to hang out a little bit with Juggler (Wayne Elise) who was a big deal in the early PUA community (although we didn’t spend a ton of time talking about PUA).
Although a lot of ideas they were pushing back then seem kind of dated now, many mainstream ideas about men’s dating you see these days came from them. Of course, the PUA community has been nuked by bad press and has sort of faded into the background and/or merged with Red Pill/men’s websites (See Roosh, Roissy & Rollo, for example).
In my case, I’m a big reader, so I was able to search through some of the Kindle highlights or quote collections I had put together over the years to compile this. I also found a list I put together from way back in 2011 that had some notes about women that I mostly got from Mystery and Neil Strauss (although the names weren’t always attached to each quote). Some of that material is timeless and still seems to resonate today.
So, here are the quotes that came out of that whole process.