Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “Having nothing to hide relieves stress and builds trust.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

155. “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

156. “Train, guardrail, or remove people; don’t rehabilitate them.”

— Ray Dalio

157. “Escalate when you can’t adequately handle your responsibilities.”

— Ray Dalio

158. “I just want to be right – I don’t care if the right answer comes from me.”

— Ray Dalio

159. “Getting a lot of attention for being successful is a bad position to be in.”

— Ray Dalio

160. “If your people are bound by a sense of community and mission and they are capable, you will have an extraordinary organization.”

— Ray Dalio

161. “Assess believability by systematically capturing people’s track records over time. Every day is not a new day. Over time, a body of evidence builds up, showing which people can be relied on and which cannot. Track records matter, and at Bridgewater tools such as Baseball Cards and the Dot Collector make everyone’s track records available for scrutiny.”

— Ray Dalio

162. “Make your passion and your work one and the same and do it with people you want to be with.”

— Ray Dalio

163. “Everyone has weaknesses. They are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make.”

— Ray Dalio

164. “Experience taught me how invaluable it is to reflect on and write down my decision-making criteria whenever I made a decision, so I got in the habit of doing that.”

— Ray Dalio

165. “Evaluate accurately, not kindly.”

— Ray Dalio

166. “Remember that great expectations create great capabilities. If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.”

— Ray Dalio

167. “Remember that people who see things and think one way often have difficulty communicating with and relating to people who see things and think another way.”

— Ray Dalio

168. “Think of your teams the way that sports managers do: No one person possesses everything required to produce success, yet everyone must excel.”

— Ray Dalio

169. “It seems to me that life consists of three phases. In the first, we are dependent on others and we learn. In the second, others depend on us and we work. And in the third and last, when others no longer depend on us and we no longer have to work, we are free to savor life.”

— Ray Dalio

170. “Never say anything about someone that you wouldn’t say to them directly and don’t try people without accusing them to their faces.”

— Ray Dalio

171. “Find the most believable people possible who disagree with you and try to understand their reasoning.”

— Ray Dalio

172. “A culture and its people are symbiotic – the culture attracts certain kinds of people and the people in turn either reinforce or evolve the culture based on their values and what they’re like. If you choose the right people with the right values and remain in sync with them, you will play beautiful jazz together. If you choose the wrong people, you will all go over the waterfall together.”

— Ray Dalio

173. “It is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning.”

— Ray Dalio

174. “Money is a byproduct of excellence, not a goal. Our overriding objective is excellence and constant improvement at Bridgewater. To be clear, it is not to make lots of money. The natural extension of this is not that you should be happy with little money. On the contrary – you should expect to make a lot. If we operate consistently with this philosophy we should be productive and the company should do well financially. There is comparatively little age- and seniority-based hierarchy.”

— Ray Dalio

175. “What was most important wasn’t knowing the future – it was knowing how to react appropriately to the information available at each point in time.”

— Ray Dalio

176. “When faced with the choice between two things you need that are seemingly at odds, go slowly to figure out how you can have as much of both as possible. 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

177. “Embracing radical truth and radical transparency will bring more meaningful work and more meaningful relationships.”

— Ray Dalio

178. “Understand the differences between managing, micromanaging, and not managing.”

— Ray Dalio

179. “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 smarter to start with what you really want, which are your real goals, and then work back to what you need to attain them. Money will be one of the things you need, but it’s not the only one and certainly not the most important one once you get past having the amount you need to get what you really want.”

— Ray Dalio

180. “Don’t let the little things divide you when your agreement on the big things should bind you.”

— Ray Dalio

181. “Evolution is the single greatest force in the universe; it is the only thing that is permanent and it drives everything.”

— Ray Dalio

182. “I have found it helpful to think of my life as if it were a game in which each problem I face is a puzzle I need to solve. By solving the puzzle, I get a gem in the form of a principle that helps me avoid the same sort of problem in the future. Collecting these gems continually improves my decision making, so I am able to ascend to higher and higher levels of play in which the game gets harder and the stakes become ever greater.”

— Ray Dalio

183. “Know what your people are like and what makes them tick, because your people are your most important resource. Develop a full profile of each person’s values, abilities, and skills. These qualities are the real drivers of behavior, so knowing them in detail will tell you which jobs a person can and cannot do well, which ones they should avoid, and how the person should be trained.”

— Ray Dalio

184. “Principles are fundamental truths that serve as the foundations for behavior that gets you what you want out of life. They can be applied again and again in similar situations to help you achieve your goals.”

— Ray Dalio

185. “Establish clear metrics to make certain that you are following your plan.”

— Ray Dalio

186. “Think of every decision as a bet with a probability and a reward for being right and a probability and a penalty for being wrong. Normally a winning decision is one with a positive expected value, meaning that the reward times its probability of occurring is greater than the penalty times its probability of occurring, with the best decision being the one with the highest expected value.”

— Ray Dalio

187. “It’s tough to be tough on people.”

— Ray Dalio

188. “Beware of group-think: The fact that no one seems concerned doesn’t mean nothing is wrong.”

— Ray Dalio

189. “Distinguish between you as the designer of your machine and you as a worker with your machine.”

— Ray Dalio

190. “My business has always been a way to get me into exotic places and allow me to meet interesting people. If I make any money from those trips, that’s just icing on the cake.”

— Ray Dalio

191. “Know what types of mistakes are acceptable and what types are unacceptable, and don’t allow the people who work for you to make the unacceptable ones.”

— Ray Dalio

192. “As Carl Jung put it, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” It’s even more important that decision making be evidence-based and logical when groups of people are working together.”

— Ray Dalio

193. “The most valuable habit I’ve acquired is using pain to trigger quality reflections. If you can acquire this habit yourself, you will learn what causes your pain and what you can do about it, and it will have an enormous impact on your effectiveness.”

— Ray Dalio

194. “The most important thing is that you develop your own principles and ideally write them down, especially if you are working with others.”

— Ray Dalio

195. “While I used to get angry and frustrated at people because of the choices they made, I came to realize that they weren’t intentionally acting in a way that seemed counterproductive; they were just living out things as they saw them, based on how their brains worked.”

— Ray Dalio

196. “Tough love is effective for achieving both great work and great relationships.”

— Ray Dalio

197. “Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.”

— Ray Dalio

198. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

199. “What I wanted was to have an interesting, diverse life filled with lots of learning – and especially meaningful work and meaningful relationships. I feel that I have gotten these in abundance and I am happy.”

— Ray Dalio

200. “To be principled means to consistently operate with principles that can be clearly explained.”

— Ray Dalio