Top 40 Naval Ravikant Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Don’t take yourself so seriously. You’re just a monkey with a plan.”

— Naval Ravikant

2. “Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

— Naval Ravikant

3. “You have two lives, and the second one begins when you realize you only have one.”

— Naval Ravikant

4. “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life.”

— Naval Ravikant

5. “Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

— Naval Ravikant

6. “The most dangerous things are heroin, and a monthly salary.” Right, because they are highly addictive.”

— Naval Ravikant

7. “Every second you have on this planet is very precious, and it’s your responsibility to make sure you’re happy and interpreting everything in the best possible way.”

— Naval Ravikant

8. “Escape competition through authenticity.”

— Naval Ravikant

9. “To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside, is play from the inside.”

— Naval Ravikant

10. “The smarter you get, the slower you read.”

— Naval Ravikant

11. “You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough.”

— Naval Ravikant

12. “The means of learning are abundant, the desire to learn is scarce.”

— Naval Ravikant

13. “The most dangerous things are heroin and a monthly salary.”

— Naval Ravikant

14. “Wealth buys your freedom.”

— Naval Ravikant

15. “If you’re good with computers, if you’re good at basic mathematics, if you’re good at writing, if you’re good at speaking, and if you like reading, you’re set for life.”

— Naval Ravikant

16. “Specialisation is for insects. I don’t believe in this model of trying to focus your life down one thing. You’ve got one life just do everything you want.”

— Naval Ravikant

17. “Getting rich is about knowing what to do, who to do it with, and when to do it. It is much more about understanding than purely hard work. Yes, hard work matters, and you can’t skimp on it. But it has to be directed in the right way. If you don’t know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out. You should not grind at a lot of hard work until you figure out what you should be working on.”

— Naval Ravikant

18. “Renting out your time means you’re essentially replaceable.”

— Naval Ravikant

19. “All greatness comes from suffering.”

— Naval Ravikant

20. “Inspiration is perishable-act one it immediately.”

— Naval Ravikant

21. “In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it. It’s that struggle, that aversion, that is responsible for most of our misery. The phrase that I probably use the most to myself in my head is just one word: accept.”

— Naval Ravikant

22. “The people who have the ability to fail in public under their own name actually gain a lot of power.”

— Naval Ravikant

23. “Knowledge is a skyscraper. You can take a shortcut with a fragile foundation of memorization, or build slowly upon a steel frame of understanding.”

— Naval Ravikant

24. “Status is your ranking in the social hierarchy.”

— Naval Ravikant

25. “I’ve learned that tit-for-tat iterated prisoner’s dilemma is the piece of game theory that is worth knowing the most. You can almost put down the game theory book after that.”

— Naval Ravikant

26. “A rational person can find peace by cultivating indifference to things outside their control.”

— Naval Ravikant

27. “If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking.”

— Naval Ravikant

28. “Reading is the ultimate meta-skill that can be traded for anything else.”

— Naval Ravikant

29. “Art is anything done for its own sake.”

— Naval Ravikant

30. “People living below their means have freedom.”

— Naval Ravikant

31. “If you care about ethics in wealth creation, it is better to create your wealth using code and media as leverage because then those products are equally available to everybody as opposed to trying to create your wealth through labor or capital.”

— Naval Ravikant

32. “I don’t actually read a lot of books. I pick up a lot of books and only get through a few, which form the foundation of my knowledge.”

— Naval Ravikant

33. “If you want to be a philosopher king first become a king then become a philosopher. Not first become a philosopher and then become a king.”

— Naval Ravikant

34. “A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.”

— Naval Ravikant

35. “I would rather read the best 100 books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read all the books.”

— Naval Ravikant

36. “So, if you’re willing to bleed a little bit every day but in exchange you’ll win big later, you will do better. That is, by the way, entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs bleed every day. They’re not making money, they’re losing money, they’re constantly stressed out, all the responsibility is upon them, but when they win they win big. On average they’ll make more. 19.”

— Naval Ravikant

37. “Any meeting with eight people sitting around at a conference table, nothing is getting done in that meeting. You are literally just dying one hour at a time.”

— Naval Ravikant

38. “Competing without software is like competing without electricity.”

— Naval Ravikant

39. “You must own equity to gain your financial freedom.”

— Naval Ravikant

40. “People creating wealth will always be attacked by people playing status games.”

— Naval Ravikant

41. “Entrepreneurship is essentially an act of creating something new from scratch. Predicting that society will want it, and then figuring out how to scale it, and get it to everybody in a profitable way, in a self-sustaining way.”

— Naval Ravikant

42. “Taleb’s Skin In The Game is required reading.”

— Naval Ravikant

43. “So, you want to look for professions and careers where the inputs and outputs are highly disconnected.”

— Naval Ravikant

44. “If I do my job right, if I create value for society, society says, “Oh, thank you. We owe you something in the future for the work that you did in the past. Here’s a little IOU. Let’s call that money.”

— Naval Ravikant