Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position, of the individual.”

— Ray Dalio

452. “Buddhist monks who had practiced more than ten thousand hours of meditation, researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured significantly higher levels of gamma waves in their brains; these waves are associated with perception and problem solving.”

— Ray Dalio

453. “While it’s easier to avoid confrontations in the short run, the consequences of doing so can be massively destructive in the long term. It’s critical that conflicts actually get resolved – not through superficial compromise, but through seeking the important, accurate conclusions.”

— Ray Dalio

454. “You should be able to delegate the details.”

— Ray Dalio

455. “From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn’t be evolving. Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we’re perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them.”

— Ray Dalio

456. “There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.”

— Ray Dalio

457. “El trabajo y las relaciones significativos eran, y son, mis objetivos principales, y lo subordinaba todo a ellos. Ganar dinero era una consecuencia accidental de lo anterior.”

— Ray Dalio

458. “Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. That’s bad, because it is more important to understand and deal with the bad staff since the good staff will take care of itself.”

— Ray Dalio

459. “Inexperienced people can have great ideas too, sometimes far better ones than more experienced people.”

— Ray Dalio

460. “Acknowledging your weaknesses is not the same as surrendering to them. It’s the first step toward overcoming them. The pains you are feeling are “growing pains” that will test your character and reward you as you push through them.”

— Ray Dalio

461. “Most people initially find this process very uncomfortable. While most appreciate it intellectually, they typically are challenged by it emotionally because it requires them to separate themselves from their ego’s attachment to being right and try to see what they have a hard time seeing.”

— Ray Dalio

462. “Principles are like laws – you can’t break one simply because you and someone else agree to break it.”

— Ray Dalio

463. “Enforce the logic of conversations. People’s emotions tend to heat up when there is disagreement. Remain calm and analytical at all times; it is more difficult to shut down a logical exchange than an emotional one. Remember too that emotions can shade how people see reality.”

— Ray Dalio

464. “Each person at Bridgewater should act like an owner, responsible for operating in this way and for holding others accountable to operate in this way.”

— Ray Dalio

465. “Seeing one of the richest and most accomplished men on the planet lose everything made a huge impression on me.”

— Ray Dalio

466. “People with proven track records in a certain area would get more believability, or decision-making weight, within that area. By recording these qualities in people’s Baseball Cards, others who’d never worked with them before could know what to expect from them.”

— Ray Dalio

467. “People who are one way on the inside and another way on the outside become conflicted and often lose touch with their own values. It’s difficult for them to be happy and almost impossible for them to be their best.”

— Ray Dalio

468. “So I learned to be radically open-minded to allow others to point out what I might be missing.”

— Ray Dalio

469. “Aristotle defined tragedy as a terrible outcome arising from a person’s fatal flaw – a flaw that, had it been fixed, instead would have led to a wonderful outcome.”

— Ray Dalio

470. “Evolve or die. This evolutionary cycle is not just for people but for countries, companies, economies – for everything. And it is naturally self-correcting as a whole, though not necessarily for its parts.”

— Ray Dalio

471. “Hire someone better than you.”

— Ray Dalio

472. “I’ll explain the concept of believability in more detail in later chapters, but to cover it quickly: Believable parties are those who have repeatedly and successfully accomplished something – and have great explanations for how they did it.”

— Ray Dalio

473. “It can be any kind of long-term challenge that leads to personal improvement.”

— Ray Dalio

474. “The worst thing you can be is a phony, because if you’re a phony you will lose people’s trust.”

— Ray Dalio

475. “Use daily updates as a tool for staying on top of what your people are doing and thinking. I ask each person who reports to me to take about ten to fifteen minutes to write a brief description of what they did that day, the issues pertaining to them, and their reflections.”

— Ray Dalio

476. “You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed – or you won’t and you will fail.”

— Ray Dalio

477. “The need for phony praise needs to be unlearned.”

— Ray Dalio

478. “Most people have a tough time reflecting when they are in pain and they pay attention to other things when the pain passes, so they miss out on the reflections that provide the lessons.”

— Ray Dalio

479. “By looking at nature from the top down, we can see that much of what we call human nature is really animal nature.”

— Ray Dalio

480. “Duhigg’s core idea is the role of the three-step “habit loop.” The first step is a cue – some “trigger that tells your brain to go into automatic mode and which habit to use,” according to Duhigg. Step two is the routine, “which can be physical or mental or emotional.” Finally, there is a reward, which helps your brain figure out if this particular loop is “worth remembering for the future.”

— Ray Dalio

481. “Know where the line is and be on the far side of fair.”

— Ray Dalio

482. “Some people want to change the world and others want to operate in simple harmony with it and savor life. Neither is better.”

— Ray Dalio

483. “Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

— Ray Dalio

484. “Know that nobody can see themselves objectively. While we should all strive to see ourselves objectively, we shouldn’t expect everyone to be able to do that well. We all have blind spots; people are by definition subjective. For this reason, it is everyone’s responsibility to help others learn what is true about themselves by giving them honest feedback, holding them accountable, and working through disagreements in an open-minded way.”

— Ray Dalio

485. “Debating takes time, and that time increases exponentially depending on the number of people participating in the discussion, so you have to carefully choose the right people in the right numbers to suit the decision that needs to be made. In any discussion try to limit the participation to those whom you value most in light of your objectives. The worst way to pick people is based on whether their conclusions align with yours.”

— Ray Dalio

486. “Unattainable goals appeal to heroes”, he once told me. “Capable people are those who sit there worrying about the future. the unwise are those who worry about nothing. If conflicts got resolved before they became acute, there wouldn’t be any heroes.”

— Ray Dalio

487. “The Spiritual Brain.”

— Ray Dalio

488. “I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot.”

— Ray Dalio

489. “As a result, I tended to hire people who were the same way – who would dive right into challenges, figure out what to do about them, and then do it. I figured that if they had great character, common sense, and creativity, and were driven to achieve our shared mission, they would discover what it took to be successful if I gave them the freedom to figure out how to make the right decisions.”

— Ray Dalio

490. “Teach and reinforce the merits of mistake-based learning. To encourage people to bring their mistakes into the open and analyze them objectively, managers need to foster a culture that makes this normal and that penalizes suppressing or covering up mistakes.”

— Ray Dalio

491. “You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity.”

— Ray Dalio

492. “Don’t pay as much attention to people’s conclusions as to the reasoning that led them to their conclusions. It is common for conversations to consist of people sharing their conclusions rather than exploring the reasoning that led to those conclusions. As a result, there is an overabundance of confidently expressed bad opinions.”

— Ray Dalio

493. “But I keep that pain in perspective, knowing that I will get through these setbacks and that most of my learning will come from reflecting on them.”

— Ray Dalio

494. “It’s senseless to have making money as your goal as money has no intrinsic value – its value comes from what it can buy, and it can’t buy everything. It’s.”

— Ray Dalio

495. “I learned a great fear of being wrong that shifted my mind-set from thinking “I’m right” to asking myself “How do I know I’m right?”

— Ray Dalio

496. “You don’t achieve happiness by getting rid of your problems – you achieve it by learning from them.”

— Ray Dalio

497. “I attribute as much of my success to what I’ve learned about the brain as I do to my understanding of economics and investing.”

— Ray Dalio

498. “If you’re willing to confront reality, accept the pain that comes with doing so, and follow the 5-Step Process to drive yourself toward your goals, you’re on the path to success. Yet most people fail to do this because they hold on to bad opinions that could easily be rectified by going above themselves to objectively look down at their situation and weigh what they and others think about it. It’s for that reason I believe you must be radically open-minded.”

— Ray Dalio

499. “I used to think that memory-based, conscious learning was the most powerful, but I’ve since come to understand that it produces.”

— Ray Dalio

500. “Embrace tough love. In my own life, what I want to give to people, most importantly to people I love, is the power to deal with reality to get what they want. In pursuit of my goal to give them strength, I will often deny them what they “want” because that will give them.”

— Ray Dalio