Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “Choose your habits well. Habit is probably the most powerful tool in your brain’s toolbox.”

— Ray Dalio

102. “Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities. Anything is possible. It’s the probabilities that matter. Everything must be weighed in terms of its likelihood and prioritized.”

— Ray Dalio

103. “What you will be will depend on the perspective you have.”

— Ray Dalio

104. “Focus more on making the pie bigger than on exactly how to slice it.”

— Ray Dalio

105. “The pursuit of dreams is what gives life its flavor.”

— Ray Dalio

106. “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. You will think you have failed – but that won’t be true unless you give up.”

— Ray Dalio

107. “Because most people are more emotional than logical, they tend to overreact to short-term results; they give up and sell low when times are bad and buy too high when times are good. I find this is just as true for relationships as it is for investments – wise people stick with sound fundamentals through the ups and downs, while flighty people react emotionally to how things feel, jumping into things when they’re hot and abandoning them when they’re not.”

— Ray Dalio

108. “I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.”

— Ray Dalio

109. “Over the course of our lives, we make millions and millions of decisions that are essentially bets, some large and some small. It pays to think about how we make them because they are what ultimately determine the quality of our lives.”

— Ray Dalio

110. “Remember that in great partnerships, consideration and generosity are more important than money.”

— Ray Dalio

111. “The most meaningful relationships are achieved when you and others can speak openly to each other about everything that’s important, learn together, and understand the need to hold each other accountable to be as excellent as you can be.”

— Ray Dalio

112. “Remember that everyone has opinions and they are often bad. Opinions are easy to produce; everyone has plenty of them and most people are eager to share them – even to fight for them. Unfortunately many are worthless or even harmful, including a lot of your own.”

— Ray Dalio

113. “Remember that weaknesses don’t matter if you find solutions.”

— Ray Dalio

114. “Getting the right people in the right roles in support of your goal is the key to succeeding at whatever you choose to accomplish.”

— Ray Dalio

115. “If you are ready to give up everything else and study the whole history and background of the market and all principal companies whose stocks are on the board as carefully as a medical student studies anatomy – if you can do all that and in addition you have the cool nerves of a gambler, the sixth sense of a clairvoyant and the courage of a lion, you have a ghost of a chance.”

— Ray Dalio

116. “To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. If you are too proud of what you know or of how good you are at something you will learn less, make inferior decisions, and fall short of your potential.”

— Ray Dalio

117. “In trading you have to be defensive and aggressive at the same time.”

— Ray Dalio

118. “Everybody has strengths and weaknesses. The key to success is understanding one’s weaknesses and successfully compensating for them. People who lack that ability fail chronically.”

— Ray Dalio

119. “Logic, reason, and common sense are your best tools for synthesizing reality and understanding what to do about it.”

— Ray Dalio

120. “The greatest gift you can give someone is the power to be successful. Giving people the opportunity to struggle rather than giving them the things they are struggling for will make them stronger.”

— Ray Dalio

121. “Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.”

— Ray Dalio

122. “You must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true.”

— Ray Dalio

123. “Put things in perspective by going back before going forward.”

— Ray Dalio

124. “Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.”

— Ray Dalio

125. “I’m going to give away a lot more than half my money. I’d be happy to give that to the government if the government put together programs that were like I’m giving away to charity, in which I believe the money is effectively used to help people.”

— Ray Dalio

126. “Closed-minded people are more likely to make statements than ask questions.”

— Ray Dalio

127. “My painful mistakes shifted me from having a perspective of “I know I’m right” to having one of “How do I know I’m right?”

— Ray Dalio

128. “The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots.”

— Ray Dalio

129. “He who lives by the crystal ball is destined to eat ground glass.”

— Ray Dalio

130. “Don’t have anything to do with closed-minded people. Being open-minded is much more important than being bright or smart.”

— Ray Dalio

131. “Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. You must be willing to do things in the unique ways you think are best.”

— Ray Dalio

132. “Thoughtful disagreement is not a battle; its goal is not to convince the other party that he or she is wrong and you are right, but to find out what is true and what to do about it.”

— Ray Dalio

133. “To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained. Unfortunately, most people can’t do that. And it’s very rare for people to write their principles down and share them.”

— Ray Dalio

134. “Most of life’s greatest opportunities come out of moments of struggle; it’s up to you to make the most of these tests of creativity and character.”

— Ray Dalio

135. “Use “double-do” rather than “double-check” to make sure mission-critical tasks are done correctly. Double-checking has a much higher rate of errors than double-doing, which is having two different people do the same task so that they produce two independent answers.”

— Ray Dalio

136. “The best way to make great decisions is to know how to triangulate with other, more knowledgeable people.”

— Ray Dalio

137. “Reflect and remind yourself that an accurate criticism is the most valuable feedback you can receive.”

— Ray Dalio

138. “To visualize what I mean by “shaping” and “shapers,” think of Steve Jobs, who was probably the greatest and most iconic shaper of our time, as measured by the size and success of his shaping.”

— Ray Dalio

139. “Our brains work like computers: They input data and process it in accordance with their wiring and programming. Any opinion you have is made up of these two things: the data and your processing or reasoning.”

— Ray Dalio

140. “If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life.”

— Ray Dalio

141. “Build your organization from the top down. An organization is the opposite of a building: Its foundation is at the top, so make sure you hire managers before you hire their reports. Managers can help design the machine and choose the people who complement it.”

— Ray Dalio

142. “I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships. One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners and shun losers. True friends are the opposite.”

— Ray Dalio

143. “Weigh second- and third-order consequences.”

— Ray Dalio

144. “I came to see that people’s greatest weaknesses are the flip sides of their greatest strengths.”

— Ray Dalio

145. “Having nothing to hide relieves stress and builds trust.”

— Ray Dalio

146. “Don’t hire people just to fit the first job they will do; hire people you want to share your life with.”

— Ray Dalio

147. “I saw pain as nature’s reminder that there is something important for me to learn.”

— Ray Dalio

148. “To me, the greatest success you can have as the person in charge is to orchestrate others to do things well without you. A.”

— Ray Dalio

149. “If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done.”

— Ray Dalio

150. “Think like an owner, and expect the people you work with to do the same.”

— Ray Dalio