Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Treat your life like a game.”

— Ray Dalio

2. “Don’t worry about looking good – worry about achieving your goals.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Financial Success Quotes, Performance Quotes, Goal Setting Quotes, Taking Action Quotes, Work Hard Quotes

3. “When you think that it’s too hard, remember that in the long run, doing the things that will make you successful is a lot easier than being unsuccessful.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Prosperity Quotes, Wealth Quotes, Performance Quotes, Career Development Quotes, Not Giving Up Quotes

4. “By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn’t give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.”

— Ray Dalio

5. “Do not feel bad about your mistakes or those of others. Love them! Remember that one: they are to be expected; two: they’re the first and most essential part of the learning process; and three: feeling bad about them will prevent you from getting better.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Failure Quotes, Experience Quotes, Growth Mindset Quotes, Professional Growth Quotes, Lifelong Learning Quotes

6. “Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Principles And Laws

7. “It’s more important to do big things well than to do small things perfectly.”

— Ray Dalio

8. “To make money in the markets, you have to think independently and be humble.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Wealth Quotes, Investing Quotes

9. “Success is achieved by people who deeply understand reality and know how to use it to get what they want. The converse is also true: idealists who are not well-grounded in reality create problems, not progress.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Financial Success Quotes

10. “Meditation more than anything in my life was the biggest ingredient of whatever success I’ve had.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Meditation Quotes

11. “School typically doesn’t prepare young people for real life – unless their lives are spent following instructions and pleasing others. In my opinion, that’s why so many students who succeed in school fail in life.”

— Ray Dalio

12. “The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you’ll be.”

— Ray Dalio

13. “He who lives by the crystal ball will eat shattered glass.”

— Ray Dalio

14. “More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don’t is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively.”

— Ray Dalio

15. “If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don’t face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Obstacles Quotes, Problem-Solving Quotes

16. “If you don’t own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.”

— Ray Dalio

17. “The best advice I can give you is to ask yourself what do you want, then ask ‘what is true’ – and then ask yourself ‘what should be done about it.’ I believe that if you do this you will move much faster towards what you want to get out of life than if you don’t!”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Decision-Making Quotes

18. “Life is like a giant smorgasbord of more delicious alternatives than you can ever hope to taste. So you have to reject having some things you want in order to get other things you want more.”

— Ray Dalio

19. “Remember that experience creates internalization. Doing things repeatedly leads to internalization, which produces a quality of understanding that is generally vastly superior to intellectualized learning.”

— Ray Dalio

20. “It is a law of nature that you must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult things.”

— Ray Dalio

21. “Pull in your belt, spend less, and reduce debt.”

— Ray Dalio

Featured in: Financial Success Quotes

22. “Almost everything is like a machine.”

— Ray Dalio

23. “People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.”

— Ray Dalio

24. “Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don’t know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don’t.”

— Ray Dalio

25. “I believe that for the most part, achieving success – whatever that is for you – is mostly a matter of personal choice and that, initially, making the right choices can be difficult.”

— Ray Dalio

26. “What matters most is that the people you work with share your values.”

— Ray Dalio

27. “There are far more good answers “out there” than there are in you.”

— Ray Dalio

28. “Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.”

— Ray Dalio

29. “You should have a strategic asset allocation mix that assumes that you don’t know what the future is going to hold.”

— Ray Dalio

30. “When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.”

— Ray Dalio

31. “I also believe that everyone needs to think independently and make their own decisions on what makes the most sense.”

— Ray Dalio

32. “Successful people ask for the criticism of others and consider its merit.”

— Ray Dalio

33. “An economy is not a complicated thing; it just has a lot of moving parts.”

— Ray Dalio

34. “People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don’t know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.”

— Ray Dalio

35. “Be wary of the arrogant intellectual who comments from the stands without having played on the field.”

— Ray Dalio

36. “You’ll see that excuses like “That’s not easy” are of no value and that it pays to “push through it” at a pace you can handle. Like getting physically fit, the most important thing is that you keep moving forward at whatever pace you choose, recognizing the consequences of your actions.”

— Ray Dalio

37. “Watch out for people who think it’s embarrassing not to know.”

— Ray Dalio

38. “Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.”

— Ray Dalio

39. “I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.”

— Ray Dalio

40. “Meditation helps you stay in a calm, clear-headed state so that when challenges come at you, you can deal with them like a ninja – in a calm thoughtful way. When you’re centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.”

— Ray Dalio

41. “If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential.”

— Ray Dalio

42. “I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I’ll come out of it refreshed and centered and that’s how I’ll feel and it’ll carry through the day.”

— Ray Dalio

43. “Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.”

— Ray Dalio

44. “Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.”

— Ray Dalio

45. “In the end, what matters most is that the people you work with share your values, so I’ve wanted people who value the meaningful work and meaningful relationships that always motivated me in building Bridgewater.”

— Ray Dalio

46. “I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.”

— Ray Dalio

47. “To test if you are worrying too much about looking good, observe how you feel when you find out you’ve made a mistake or don’t know something.”

— Ray Dalio

48. “When you’re centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.”

— Ray Dalio

49. “The main reason I write the daily observations is because I want to know where I’m wrong. So lots of times if somebody points something out it helps me, and I want to have a diversified bet of uncorrelated bets.”

— Ray Dalio

50. “Embrace Reality and Deal with It.”

— Ray Dalio