Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

452. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

454. “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

455. “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

456. “Hire someone better than you.”

— Ray Dalio

457. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

459. “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

460. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

462. “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

463. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

468. “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

469. “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

470. “I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense, which I suppose was related to my having started Bridgewater two years out of school myself, and my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something.”

— Ray Dalio

471. “No matter what work you do, at a high level you are simply setting goals and building machines to help you achieve them. I built the machine that is Bridgewater by constantly comparing its actual outcomes to my mental map of the outcomes that it should be producing, and finding ways to improve it.”

— Ray Dalio

472. “Keeping people in jobs they are not suited for is terrible for them because it allows them to live in a false reality while holding back their personal evolution, and it is terrible for the community because it compromises the meritocracy and everyone pays the price.”

— Ray Dalio

473. “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

474. “Over the decades since, I’ve repeatedly seen policymakers deliver such assurances immediately before currency devaluations, so I learned not to believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won’t let a currency devaluation happen. The more strongly they make those assurances, the more desperate the situation probably is, so the more likely it is that a devaluation will take place.”

— Ray Dalio

475. “Having greatly reduced its price risk, McDonald’s introduced the McNugget in 1983. I felt great about helping make that happen.”

— Ray Dalio

476. “Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History.”

— Ray Dalio

477. “Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities.”

— Ray Dalio

478. “Recognize that performance in school doesn’t tell you much about whether a person has the values and abilities you are looking for. Largely because they are the easiest to measure, memory and processing speed tend to be the abilities that determine success in school, so school performance is an excellent gauge of these qualities.”

— Ray Dalio

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “Synthesis is the process of converting a lot of data into an accurate picture.”

— Ray Dalio

484. “It is now generically called “risk parity” investing.”

— Ray Dalio

485. “One of the most important decisions you can make is who you ask questions of. Make.”

— Ray Dalio

486. “Communicate the plan clearly and have clear metrics conveying whether you are progressing according to it.”

— Ray Dalio

487. “Software developers, mathematicians, and game-theory modelers aren’t running away with all the rewards; it is the people who have the most common sense, imagination, and determination.”

— Ray Dalio

488. “The unwise are those who worry about nothing.”

— Ray Dalio

489. “Whatever success I’ve had is because of the principles I followed and not because of anything unique about me, so anyone following these principles can expect to produce broadly similar results.”

— Ray Dalio

490. “After seeing how much more effective it is to face the painful realities that are caused by your problems, mistakes, and weaknesses, I believe you won’t want to operate any other way. It’s just a matter of getting in the habit of doing it.”

— Ray Dalio

491. “Have the clearest possible reporting lines and delineations of responsibilities.”

— Ray Dalio

492. “Some decisions are best made after acquiring more information; some are best made immediately.”

— Ray Dalio

493. “My fear of being wrong pushed me to seek out other smart folks to poke holes in my view.”

— Ray Dalio

494. “Just as our physical attributes determine the limits of what we are able to do physically – some people are tall and others are short, some muscular and others weak – our brains are innately different in ways that set the parameters of what we are able to do mentally.”

— Ray Dalio

495. “History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially.”

— Ray Dalio

496. “My plan was to step out as CEO while helping my replacements as a mentor, remain in my investment role, and take the time I gained from no longer managing the company to suck the marrow out of life while I still could.”

— Ray Dalio

497. “I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way.”

— Ray Dalio

498. “It’s smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them.”

— Ray Dalio

499. “Any damn fool can make it complex.”

— Ray Dalio

500. “There is no worse course in leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away.”

— Ray Dalio