Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “A proper goal is something that you really need to achieve. Desires are things that you want that can prevent you from reaching your goals.”

— Ray Dalio

302. “I believe that great cultures, like great people, recognize that making mistakes is part of the process of learning, and that continuous learning is what allows an organization to evolve successfully over time.”

— Ray Dalio

303. “It doesn’t pay to be open-minded with everyone. Instead, spend your time exploring ideas with the most believable people you have access to.”

— Ray Dalio

304. “Create a Culture in Which It Is Okay to Make Mistakes and Unacceptable Not to Learn from Them.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

306. “Governance is the oversight system that removes the people and the processes if they aren’t working well. It is the process that checks and balances power to assure that the principles and interests of the community as a whole are always placed above the interests and power of any individual or faction. Because power will rule, power must be put in the hands of capable people in key roles who have the right values, do their jobs well, and will check and balance the power of others.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

309. “The courage that’s needed the most isn’t the kind that drives you to prevail over others, but the kind that allows you to be true to your truest self, no matter what other people want you to be.”

— Ray Dalio

310. “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

311. “If you are disappointed because you can’t be the best person to do everything yourself, you are terribly naive. Nobody can do everything well. Would you want to have Einstein on your basketball team? When he fails to dribble and shoot well, would you think badly of him? Should he feel humiliated? Imagine all the areas in which Einstein was incompetent, and imagine how hard he struggled to excel even in the areas in which he was the best in the world.”

— Ray Dalio

312. “You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.”

— Ray Dalio

313. “Look to the patterns of those things that affect you in order to understand the cause-effect relationships that drive them and to learn principles for dealing with them effectively.”

— Ray Dalio

314. “Be imprecise. Understand the concept of “by-and-large” and use approximations. 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

315. “Closed-minded people block others from speaking. If it seems like someone isn’t leaving space for the other person in a conversation, it’s possible they are blocking. To get around blocking, enforce the “two-minute rule” I mentioned earlier.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

317. “You have a responsibility to be reasonable and considerate.”

— Ray Dalio

318. “To be “good” something must operate consistently with the laws of reality and contribute to the evolution of the whole; that is what is most rewarded. For example, if you come up with something the world values, you almost can’t help but be rewarded. Conversely, reality tends to penalize those people, species, and things that don’t work well and detract from evolution.17.”

— Ray Dalio

319. “The main test of a great partnership is not whether the partners ever disagree – people in all healthy relationships disagree – but whether they can bring their disagreements to the surface and get through them well.”

— Ray Dalio

320. “I’ve also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances – and that isn’t smart.”

— Ray Dalio

321. “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. I wanted to surround myself with people who needed what I needed, which was to make sense of things for myself. I spoke frankly, and I expected those around me to speak frankly. I fought for what I thought was best, and I wanted them to do so as well.”

— Ray Dalio

322. “The most painful lesson that was repeatedly hammered home is that you can never be sure of anything: There are always risks out there that can hurt you badly, even in the seemingly safest bets, so it’s always best to assume you’re missing something. This lesson changed my approach to decision making in ways that will reverberate throughout this book – and to which I attribute much of my success. But I would make many other mistakes before I fully changed my behavior.”

— Ray Dalio

323. “Focus on the “what is” before deciding “what to do about it.”

— Ray Dalio

324. “Avoid getting sucked down. This occurs when a manager is pulled down to doing the tasks of a subordinate without acknowledging the problem.”

— Ray Dalio

325. “Know that the most constant struggle is between feeling and thinking.”

— Ray Dalio

326. “Julius Caesar’s overthrow of the Roman Senate and Republic as an illustration of how important it is to make sure no one person is more powerful than the system.”

— Ray Dalio

327. “Don’t get frustrated. If nothing bad is happening to you now, wait a bit and it will. That is just reality.”

— Ray Dalio

328. “All Weather Portfolio.”

— Ray Dalio

329. “My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong – and especially so publicly wrong – was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view.”

— Ray Dalio

330. “If a number of different believable people say you are doing something wrong and you are the only one who doesn’t see it that way, assume that you are probably biased.”

— Ray Dalio

331. “For most people, being part of a great community on a shared mission is even more rewarding than money. Numerous studies have shown there is little to no correlation between one’s happiness and the amount of money one accumulates, yet there is a strong correlation between one’s happiness and the quality of one’s relationships.”

— Ray Dalio

332. “From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation.”

— Ray Dalio

333. “Realize that you are simultaneously everything and nothing – and decide what you want to be.”

— Ray Dalio

334. “Yet most people are like ants focused only on themselves and their own anthill; they believe the universe revolves around people and don’t pay attention to the universal laws that are true for all species.”

— Ray Dalio

335. “In thinking about the relative importance of great relationships and money, it was clear that relationships were more important because there is no amount of money I would take in exchange for a meaningful relationship, because there is nothing I could buy with that money that would be more valuable.”

— Ray Dalio

336. “I’ve also learned that judging people before really seeing things through their eyes stands in the way of understanding their circumstances – and that isn’t smart. I urge you to be curious enough to want to understand how the people who see things differently from you came to see them that way. You will find that interesting and invaluable, and the richer perspective you gain will help you decide what you should do.”

— Ray Dalio

337. “Closed-minded people lack a deep sense of humility.”

— Ray Dalio

338. “But this approach fails in cases where the future is different from the past and you don’t know the cause-effect relationships well enough to recognize them all. Understanding these relationships as I do has saved me from making mistakes when others did, most obviously in the 2008 financial crisis. Nearly everyone else assumed that the future would be similar to the past. Focusing strictly on the logical cause-effect relationships was what allowed us to see what was really going on.”

— Ray Dalio

339. “Chances are you won’t have time to deal with the unimportant things, which is better than not having time to deal with the impor-tant things. I often hear people say, “Wouldn’t it be good to do this or that?” It’s likely they are being distracted from far more important things that need to be done well.”

— Ray Dalio

340. “Ultimately, to help people succeed you have to do two things: First let them see their failures so clearly that they are motivated to change them, and then show them how to either change what they are doing or rely on others who are strong where they are weak.”

— Ray Dalio

341. “In picking people for long-term relationships, values are most important, abilities come next, and skills are the least important.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

343. “People interested in making the best possible decisions are rarely confident that they have the best answers.”

— Ray Dalio

344. “I believe one of the most valuable things you can do to improve your decision making is to think through your principles for making decisions.”

— Ray Dalio

345. “Don’t be afraid to fix the difficult things.”

— Ray Dalio

346. “An excellent skier is probably going to be a better ski coach than a novice skier. Believability applies to management too. The better your track record, the more value you can add as a coach.”

— Ray Dalio

347. “Strategic thinking requires both diagnosis and design.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

349. “Sincerely believe that you might not know the best possible path and recognize that your ability to deal well with “not knowing” is more important than whatever it is you do know.”

— Ray Dalio

350. “Never rule out a goal because you think it’s unattainable. Be audacious. There is always a best possible path. Your job is to find it and have the courage to follow it. What you think is attainable is just a function of what you know at the moment. Once you start your pursuit you will learn a lot, especially if you triangulate with others; paths you never saw before will emerge.”

— Ray Dalio