Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

303. “Avoid fixating on irrelevant details.”

— Ray Dalio

304. “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

305. “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

306. “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

307. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

309. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “Remember that everyone must be overseen by a believable person who has high standards.”

— Ray Dalio

319. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

321. “All Weather Portfolio.”

— Ray Dalio

322. “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

323. “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

324. “Be an imperfectionist.”

— Ray Dalio

325. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

330. “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

331. “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

332. “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

333. “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

334. “Remember that there are typically many paths to achieving your goals. You only need to find one that works.”

— Ray Dalio

335. “Know that nobody can see themselves objectively. While we should all strive to see ourselves objectively, we shouldn’t expect everyone to be able to do that well. We all have blind spots; people are by definition subjective. For this reason, it is everyone’s responsibility to help others learn what is true about themselves by giving them honest feedback, holding them accountable, and working through disagreements in an open-minded way.”

— Ray Dalio

336. “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

337. “The worst thing you can be is a phony, because if you’re a phony you will lose people’s trust.”

— Ray Dalio

338. “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

339. “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

340. “They move on to fix problems without getting at their root causes, which is a recipe for continued failure.”

— Ray Dalio

341. “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

342. “If you find you can’t reconcile major differences – especially in values – consider whether the relationship is worth preserving.”

— Ray Dalio

343. “We believe that thoughtful, unemotional disagreement by independent thinkers can be converted into believability-weighted decision making that is smarter and more effective than the sum of its parts.”

— Ray Dalio

344. “Fast talking can be especially effective when it’s used against people worried about appearing stupid. Don’t be one of those people. Recognize that it’s your responsibility to make sense of things and don’t move on until you do. If you’re feeling pressured, say something like “Sorry for being stupid, but I’m going to need to slow you down so I can make sense of what you’re saying.” Then ask your questions. All of them.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

347. “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

348. “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

349. “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

350. “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