Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “Train, guardrail, or remove people; don’t rehabilitate them.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

154. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

158. “Evaluate accurately, not kindly.”

— Ray Dalio

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

163. “Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position, of the individual. The best ideas win no matter who they come from.”

— Ray Dalio

164. “Closed-minded people focus much more on being understood than on understanding others.”

— Ray Dalio

165. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

167. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

169. “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?”

— Ray Dalio

170. “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

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

176. “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

177. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

180. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.”

— Ray Dalio

187. “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

188. “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

189. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

191. “Investors think independently, anticipate things that haven’t happened yet, and put real money at stake with their bets. Policymakers come from environments that nurture consensus, not dissent, that train them to react to things that have already occurred, and that prepare them for negotiations, not placing bets. Because they don’t benefit from the constant feedback about the quality of their decisions that investors get, it’s not clear who the good and bad decision makers among them are.”

— Ray Dalio

192. “Most people assume that the challenges that go along with growing a large business are greater than those of growing a smaller one. That is not true. Going from a five-person organization to a sixty-person organization was just as challenging as going from a sixty-person organization to a seven-hundred-person organization – and from a seven-hundred-person organization to a 1,500-person one.”

— Ray Dalio

193. “Watch out for “department slip.” This happens when a support department mistakes its responsibility to provide support with a mandate to determine how the thing they are supporting should be done.”

— Ray Dalio

194. “Putting comfort ahead of success produces worse results for everyone.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

196. “Consider second- and third-order consequences, not just first-order ones.”

— Ray Dalio

197. “Learn how much confidence to have in your people – don’t assume it. No manager should delegate responsibilities to people they don’t know well.”

— Ray Dalio

198. “Understanding what is true is essential for success, and being radically transparent about everything, including mistakes and weaknesses, helps create the understanding that leads to improvements.”

— Ray Dalio

199. “I should add, though, that putting responsibility in the hands of inexperienced people doesn’t always work out so well. Some painful lessons that you’ll read about later taught me that it can be a mistake to undervalue experience.”

— Ray Dalio

200. “Remember that a good plan should resemble a movie script.”

— Ray Dalio