Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “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

202. “Managers who do not understand people’s different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

204. “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

205. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

207. “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

208. “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

209. “Force yourself and the people who work for you to do difficult things. It’s a basic law of nature: You must stretch yourself if you want to get strong.”

— Ray Dalio

210. “Regularly use pain as your guide toward quality reflection.”

— Ray Dalio

211. “The individual’s incentives must be aligned with the group’s goals.”

— Ray Dalio

212. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

215. “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

— Ray Dalio

216. “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

217. “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

218. “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

219. “Understanding, accepting, and working with reality is both practical and beautiful. I have become so much of a hyperrealist that I’ve.”

— Ray Dalio

220. “I believe that everything that happens comes about because of cause-effect relationships that repeat and evolve over time.”

— Ray Dalio

221. “I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game.”

— Ray Dalio

222. “Specifying our investment decision-making criteria in algorithms and running historical data through them, or specifying our work principles in algorithms and using them to aid in management decision making, are just bigger and more complicated versions of that smart thermostat.”

— Ray Dalio

223. “Successful organizations have cultures in which evidence-based decision making is the norm rather than the exception.”

— Ray Dalio

224. “To me, meaningful work is being on a mission I become engrossed in, and meaningful relationships are those I have with people I care deeply about and who care deeply about me. Think about it: 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.”

— Ray Dalio

225. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

227. “When offered the choice of being fair with you or taking more for themselves, most people will take more for themselves.”

— Ray Dalio

228. “Radical open- mindedness and radical transparency are invaluable for rapid learning and effective change.”

— Ray Dalio

229. “Be radically open-minded and radically transparent.”

— Ray Dalio

230. “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

231. “Reality is optimizing for the whole – not for you. Contribute to the whole and you will likely be rewarded.”

— Ray Dalio

232. “It’s important not to let our biases stand in the way of our objectivity. To get good results, we need to be analytical rather.”

— Ray Dalio

233. “If you limit your goals to what you know you can achieve, you are setting the bar way too low.”

— Ray Dalio

234. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

235. “So, for me, meaningful work and meaningful relationships were and still are my primary goals and everything I did was for them. Making money was an incidental consequence of that.”

— Ray Dalio

236. “The key is to fail, learn, and improve quickly.”

— Ray Dalio

237. “Great cultures bring problems and disagreements to the surface and solve them well, and they love imagining and building great things that haven’t been built before.”

— Ray Dalio

238. “Don’t lower the bar.”

— Ray Dalio

239. “Adaptation through rapid trial and error is invaluable.”

— Ray Dalio

240. “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

241. “Slow down your thinking so you can note the criteria you are using to make your decision.”

— Ray Dalio

242. “Be a hyperrealist. Understanding, accepting, and working with reality is both practical and beautiful. I have become so much of a hyperrealist that I’ve learned to appreciate the beauty of all realities, even harsh ones, and have come to despise impractical idealism.”

— Ray Dalio

243. “Mistakes will cause you pain, but you shouldn’t try to shield yourself or others from it. Pain is a message that something is wrong and it’s an effective teacher that one shouldn’t do that wrong thing again.”

— Ray Dalio

244. “Imagine a world in which you can use technology to connect to a system in which you can input the issue you’re dealing with and have exchanges about what you should do and why with the highest-rated thinkers in the world.”

— Ray Dalio

245. “Be Radically Open-Minded.”

— Ray Dalio

246. “Daily Observations.”

— Ray Dalio

247. “Learn about your people and have them learn about you through frank conversations about mistakes and their root causes.”

— Ray Dalio

248. “People who can accurately sort probabilities from possibilities are generally strong at “practical thinking”;.”

— Ray Dalio

249. “It is now generically called “risk parity” investing.”

— Ray Dalio

250. “As I studied history, I saw that it typically transpires via relatively well-defined life cycles, like those of organisms, that evolve as each generation transitions to the next.”

— Ray Dalio