Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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251. “Clearly assign responsibilities. Eliminate any confusion about expectations and ensure that people view their failures to complete their tasks and achieve their goals as personal failures.”

— Ray Dalio

252. “I believe that the ability to objectively self-assess, including one’s own weaknesses, is the most influential factor in whether a person succeeds, and that a healthy organization is one in which people compete not so much against each other as against the ways in which their lower-level selves get in the way.”

— Ray Dalio

253. “Since life brings both ups and downs, struggling well doesn’t just make your ups better; it makes your downs less bad.”

— Ray Dalio

254. “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

255. “Great is better than terrible, and terrible is better than mediocre, because terrible at least gives life flavor.”

— Ray Dalio

256. “I believe that all organizations basically have two types of people: those who work to be part of a mission, and those who work for a paycheck.”

— Ray Dalio

257. “Build the organization around goals rather than tasks.”

— Ray Dalio

258. “Speak frankly, listen with an open mind, consider the views of other believable and honest people, and try to get in sync about what’s going on with the person and why. Remember not to be overconfident in your assessments, as it’s possible you are wrong.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

260. “Some people go through life collecting all kinds of observations and opinions like pocket lint, instead of just keeping what they need. They have “detail anxiety,” worrying about unimportant things.”

— Ray Dalio

261. “Heroes inevitably experience at least one very big failure that tests whether they have the resilience to come back and fight smarter and with more determination.”

— Ray Dalio

262. “As much as I love and have benefited from artificial intelligence, I believe that only people can discover such things and then program computers to do them. That’s why I believe that the right people, working with each other and with computers, are the key to success.”

— Ray Dalio

263. “There were only two big forces to worry about: growth and inflation.”

— Ray Dalio

264. “Idealists who are not well grounded in reality create problems, not progress.”

— Ray Dalio

265. “Whatever circumstances life brings you, you will be more likely to succeed and find happiness if you take responsibility for making your decisions well instead of complaining about things being beyond your control. Psychologists call this having an “internal locus of control,” and studies consistently show that people who have it outperform those who don’t.”

— Ray Dalio

266. “Don’t just pay attention to your job; pay attention to how your job will be done if you are no longer around.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

268. “You don’t want the people you work with to merely pay lip service.”

— Ray Dalio

269. “In order to match a person to the design, start by creating a spec sheet so that there will be a consistent set of criteria that can be applied from recruiting through performance reviews. Bridgewater’s spec sheets use the same bank of qualities as our Baseball Cards.”

— Ray Dalio

270. “Bob Kegan called Bridgewater “a form of proof that the quest for business excellence and the search for personal realization need not be mutually exclusive – and can, in fact, be essential to each other.”

— Ray Dalio

271. “If you just keep doing, you will burn out and grind to a halt.”

— Ray Dalio

272. “Keep your strategic vision the same while making appropriate tactical changes as circumstances dictate.”

— Ray Dalio

273. “Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.”

— Ray Dalio

274. “Beyond Religion.”

— Ray Dalio

275. “Reality, in turn, will send you loud signals about how well your principles are working by rewarding or punishing you, so you will learn to fine-tune them accordingly.”

— Ray Dalio

276. “Holding wrong opinions in one’s head and making bad decisions based on them instead of having thoughtful disagreements is one of the greatest tragedies of mankind.”

— Ray Dalio

277. “While the right design is essential, it is only half the battle. It is equally important to put the right people in each of those positions.”

— Ray Dalio

278. “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

279. “I cannot emphasize enough how important the selection, training, testing, evaluation, and sorting out of people is.”

— Ray Dalio

280. “One thing that leaders should not do, in my opinion, is be manipulative.”

— Ray Dalio

281. “Fast talkers are people who articulately and assertively say things faster than they can be assessed as a way of pushing their agenda past other people’s examination or objections. Fast talking can be especially effective when it’s used against people worried about appearing stupid.”

— Ray Dalio

282. “Avoid fixating on irrelevant details.”

— Ray Dalio

283. “In my opinion, most organizations overvalue the abilities piece and undervalue the character piece because of a shortsighted focus on getting the job done. In doing so, they lose the power of the great relationships that will take them through both good and bad times.”

— Ray Dalio

284. “While in the past I would encounter problems, figure out their causes, and design my own ways to get around them, others who think differently than I do will make different diagnoses and designs. My job as mentor was to help them be successful at that.”

— Ray Dalio

285. “Watching the same things happen again and again, I began to see reality as a gorgeous perpetual motion machine, in which causes become effects that become causes of new effects, and so on.”

— Ray Dalio

286. “The biggest mistake most people make is to not see themselves and others objectively, which leads them to bump into their own and others’ weaknesses again and again. People who do this fail because they are stubbornly stuck in their own heads.”

— Ray Dalio

287. “Don’t put the expedient ahead of the strategic.”

— Ray Dalio

288. “The best behaviors one can hope for come from leaders who can weigh the benefits of cooperation, and who have long enough time frames that they can see how the gifts they give this year may bring them benefits in the future.”

— Ray Dalio

289. “People who run companies are faced with important choices every day. How they make those choices determines the character of the company, the quality of its relationships, and the outcomes it produces.”

— Ray Dalio

290. “Being radically truthful and transparent with your colleagues and expecting your colleagues to be the same with you ensures that important issues are apparent instead of hidden. It also enforces good behavior and good thinking, because when you have to explain yourself, everyone can openly assess the merits of your logic.”

— Ray Dalio

291. “Don’t mistake opinions for facts.”

— Ray Dalio

292. “What happens after we crash is most important. Successful people change in ways that allow them to continue to take advantage of their strengths while compensating for their weaknesses and unsuccessful people don’t.”

— Ray Dalio

293. “Don’t get hung up on your views of how things “should” be because you will miss out on learning how they really are.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

295. “I read Charles Duhigg’s best-selling book The Power of Habit, which really opened my eyes.”

— Ray Dalio

296. “Look to nature to learn how reality works. All the laws of reality were given to us by nature. Man didn’t create these laws, but by understanding them we can use them to foster our own evolution and achieve our goals.”

— Ray Dalio

297. “Once you identify a problem, don’t tolerate it. Tolerating a problem has the same consequences as failing to identify it. Whether you tolerate it because you believe it cannot be solved, because you don’t care enough to solve it, or because you can’t muster enough of whatever it takes to solve it, if you don’t have the will to succeed, then your situation is hopeless. You need to develop a fierce intolerance of badness of any kind, regardless of its severity.”

— Ray Dalio

298. “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

299. “Be willing to “shoot the people you love.” It is very difficult to fire people you care about.”

— Ray Dalio

300. “It seems to me that if you look back on yourself a year ago and aren’t shocked by how stupid you were, you haven’t learned much. Still, few people go out of their way to embrace their mistakes. It doesn’t have to be that way.”

— Ray Dalio