Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “I believe that understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it evolve.”

— Ray Dalio

52. “Don’t get distracted by shiny objects.”

— Ray Dalio

53. “There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.”

— Ray Dalio

54. “In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time. If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money.”

— Ray Dalio

55. “People who acquire things beyond their usefulness not only will derive little or no marginal gains from these acquisitions, but they also will experience negative consequences, as with any form of gluttony.”

— Ray Dalio

56. “Any damn fool can make it complex. It takes a genius to make it simple.”

— Ray Dalio

57. “I believe that one of the best ways of getting at truth is reflecting with others who have opposing views and who share your interest in finding the truth rather than being proven right.”

— Ray Dalio

58. “To be successful, we need everyone to think independently and work through disagreement to decide what’s best.”

— Ray Dalio

59. “There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.”

— Ray Dalio

60. “I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.”

— Ray Dalio

61. “Though how nature works is way beyond man’s ability to comprehend, I have found that observing how nature works offers innumerable lessons that can help us understand the realities that affect us.”

— Ray Dalio

62. “If it didn’t happen in your life before, then you’re not paying attention you don’t think it’s possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.”

— Ray Dalio

63. “Some people who are creative are not reliable and vice versa; some see big pictures while others see details, etc. All of them are important to have on well-orchestrated teams.”

— Ray Dalio

64. “I could see that making judgments about people so that they are tried and sentenced in your head, without asking them for their perspective, is both unethical and unproductive. So I learned to love real integrity and to despise the lack of it.”

— Ray Dalio

65. “There is giant untapped potential in disagreement, especially if the disagreement is between two or more thoughtful people.”

— Ray Dalio

66. “I believe that dreamers who simply imagine things that would be nice but are not possible don’t sufficiently appreciate the laws of the universe to understand the true implications of their desires, much less how to achieve them.”

— Ray Dalio

67. “I don’t get caught up in the moment.”

— Ray Dalio

68. “Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.”

— Ray Dalio

69. “Time is like a river that carries us forward into encounters with reality that require us to make decisions. We can’t stop our movement down this river and we can’t avoid those encounters. We can only approach them in the best possible way.”

— Ray Dalio

70. “Over the long run, the price of gold approximates the total amount of money in circulation divided by the size of the gold stock. If the market price of gold moves a long way from this level, it may indicate a buying or selling opportunity.”

— Ray Dalio

71. “There is an excellent correlation between giving society what it wants and making money, and almost no correlation between the desire to make money and how much money one makes.”

— Ray Dalio

72. “In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.”

— Ray Dalio

73. “It all comes down to interest rates. As an investor, all you’re doing is putting up a lump-sump payment for a future cash flow.”

— Ray Dalio

74. “If inflation-adjusted interest rates decline in a given country, its currency is likely to decline.”

— Ray Dalio

75. “Everyone has to decide for themselves what works for them and their organization.”

— Ray Dalio

76. “When two intelligent parties disagree, that’s when the potential for learning and moving ahead begins.”

— Ray Dalio

77. “The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly. If you’re constantly learning and improving, your evolutionary process will be ascending. Do do it poorly, it will be descending. So I believe evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest award.”

— Ray Dalio

78. “I also feared boredom and mediocrity much more than I feared failure.”

— Ray Dalio

79. “Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it’s a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.”

— Ray Dalio

80. “What I’m trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there’s inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.”

— Ray Dalio

81. “A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn’t dramatic.”

— Ray Dalio

82. “Truth – more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality – is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.”

— Ray Dalio

83. “In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it’s disruptive and it’s a problem.”

— Ray Dalio

84. “When people get at each other’s throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.”

— Ray Dalio

85. “I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.”

— Ray Dalio

86. “The world is still in deleveraging.”

— Ray Dalio

87. “Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.”

— Ray Dalio

88. “My point is simply this: Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control.”

— Ray Dalio

89. “In time, I realized that the satisfaction of success doesn’t come from achieving your goals, but from struggling well.”

— Ray Dalio

90. “Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning. Having open-minded conversations with believable people who disagree with you is the quickest way to get an education and to increase your probability of being right.”

— Ray Dalio

91. “Systemize your decision making.”

— Ray Dalio

92. “I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature’s laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.”

— Ray Dalio

93. “Watch out for people who confuse goals and tasks, because if they can’t make that distinction, you can’t trust them with responsibilities.”

— Ray Dalio

94. “Once we get the things we are striving for, we rarely remain satisfied with them. The things are just the bait. Chasing after them forces us to evolve, and it is the evolution and not the rewards themselves that matters to us and to those around us. This means that for most people success is struggling and evolving as effectively as possible.”

— Ray Dalio

95. “I notice a difference from the moment I meditate.”

— Ray Dalio

96. “There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.”

— Ray Dalio

97. “The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That’s the question to be worried about.”

— Ray Dalio

98. “Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it so that you or anyone else gets the biggest piece. The best negotiations are the ones with someone in which I say, “You should take more,” and they argue back, “No you should take more!” People who operate this way with each other make the relationship better and the pie bigger – and both benefit in the long run.”

— Ray Dalio

99. “Every time you confront something painful, you are at a potentially important juncture in your life – you have the opportunity to choose healthy and painful truth or unhealthy but comfortable delusion.”

— Ray Dalio

100. “Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.”

— Ray Dalio