Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

155. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

158. “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

159. “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

160. “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

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

165. “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

166. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

169. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

171. “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

172. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

174. “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

175. “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

176. “Appreciate the art of thoughtful disagreement.”

— Ray Dalio

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

181. “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

182. “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

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

186. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

188. “Remember that people are built very differently and that different ways of seeing and thinking make people suitable for different jobs.”

— Ray Dalio

189. “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

190. “Typically, people’s conflicting beliefs or conflicting interests make them unable to see things through another’s eyes. That’s not good and it doesn’t make sense.”

— Ray Dalio

191. “Everyone has weaknesses. They are generally revealed in the patterns of mistakes they make. Knowing what your weaknesses are and staring hard at them is the first step on the path to success.”

— Ray Dalio

192. “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

193. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

196. “Whatever success I’ve had in life has had more to do with my knowing how to deal with my not knowing than anything I know.”

— Ray Dalio

197. “There are two parts of each person’s brain: the upper-level logical part and the lower-level emotional part. I call these the “two yous.” They fight for control of each person. How that conflict is managed is the most important driver of our behaviors. That fighting was the biggest reason for the problems Bob, Giselle, and Dan raised. While the logical part of people’s brains could easily understand that knowing one’s weaknesses is a good thing.”

— Ray Dalio

198. “Build great metrics. Metrics show how the machine is working by providing numbers and setting off alert lights in a dashboard. Metrics are an objective means of assessment and they tend to have a favorable impact on productivity.”

— Ray Dalio

199. “Being hyperrealistic will help you choose your dreams wisely and then achieve them.”

— Ray Dalio

200. “One has many more supposed friends when one is up than when one is down, because most people like to be with winners than shun losers. True friends are the opposite.”

— Ray Dalio