Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Remember that the quality of the life you get will depend largely on the quality of the decisions that you make as you pursue your goals.”

— Ray Dalio

402. “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

403. “Enforce the logic of conversations. People’s emotions tend to heat up when there is disagreement. Remain calm and analytical at all times; it is more difficult to shut down a logical exchange than an emotional one. Remember too that emotions can shade how people see reality.”

— Ray Dalio

404. “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

405. “Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way.”

— Ray Dalio

406. “Espero que la lectura de este libro te anime, a ti y a otros, a descubrir tus propios principios, entre aquellos que considereis mejores, y los anoteis.”

— Ray Dalio

407. “From this perspective, we can see that perfection doesn’t exist; it is a goal that fuels a never-ending process of adaptation. If nature, or anything, were perfect it wouldn’t be evolving. Organisms, organizations, and individual people are always highly imperfect but capable of improving. So rather than getting stuck hiding our mistakes and pretending we’re perfect, it makes sense to find our imperfections and deal with them.”

— Ray Dalio

408. “No matter what you want out of life, your ability to adapt and move quickly and efficiently through the process of personal evolution will determine your success and your happiness.”

— Ray Dalio

409. “Know where the line is and be on the far side of fair.”

— Ray Dalio

410. “Never seize on the first available option, no matter how good it seems, before you’ve asked questions and explored. To prevent myself from falling into this trap, I used to literally ask myself questions: Am I learning? Have I learned enough yet that it’s time for deciding?”

— Ray Dalio

411. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

412. “Help people through the pain that comes with exploring their weaknesses. Emotions tend to heat up during most disagreements, especially when the subject is someone’s weaknesses. Speak in a calm, slow, and analytical manner to facilitate communication.”

— Ray Dalio

413. “Inexperienced people can have great ideas too, sometimes far better ones than more experienced people.”

— Ray Dalio

414. “Teach and reinforce the merits of mistake-based learning. To encourage people to bring their mistakes into the open and analyze them objectively, managers need to foster a culture that makes this normal and that penalizes suppressing or covering up mistakes.”

— Ray Dalio

415. “Unattainable goals appeal to heroes”, he once told me. “Capable people are those who sit there worrying about the future. the unwise are those who worry about nothing. If conflicts got resolved before they became acute, there wouldn’t be any heroes.”

— Ray Dalio

416. “You will either learn valuable lessons from your mistakes and press on, better equipped to succeed – or you won’t and you will fail.”

— Ray Dalio

417. “By recognizing the higher-level consequences nature optimizes for, I’ve come to see that people who overweigh the first-order consequences of their decisions and ignore the effects of second- and subsequent-order consequences rarely reach their goals. This is because first-order consequences often have opposite desirabilities from second-order consequences, resulting in big mistakes in decision making.”

— Ray Dalio

418. “Moreover, I recognized that managers who do not understand people’s different thinking styles cannot understand how the people working for them will handle different situations, which is like a foreman not understanding how his equipment will behave. That insight led us to explore psychometric testing as a way of learning how people think differently.”

— Ray Dalio

419. “Get over “blame” and “credit” and get on with “accurate” and “inaccurate.” Worrying about “blame” and “credit” or “positive” and “negative” feedback impedes the iterative process that is essential to learning. Remember that what has already happened lies in the past and no longer matters except as a lesson for the future.”

— Ray Dalio

420. “Principles are like laws – you can’t break one simply because you and someone else agree to break it.”

— Ray Dalio

421. “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.”

— Ray Dalio

422. “No matter what work you do, at a high level you are simply setting goals and building machines to help you achieve them. I built the machine that is Bridgewater by constantly comparing its actual outcomes to my mental map of the outcomes that it should be producing, and finding ways to improve it.”

— Ray Dalio

423. “Winston Churchill hit the nail on the head when he said, “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

425. “To have a real idea meritocracy, there must be transparency so that people can see things for themselves.”

— Ray Dalio

426. “I began to experience painful moments in a radically different way. Instead of feeling frustrated or overwhelmed, I saw pain as nature’s reminder that there is something important for me to learn.”

— Ray Dalio

427. “If you can think for yourself while being open-minded in a clearheaded way to find out what is best for you to do, and if you can summon up the courage to do it, you will make the most of your life. If you can’t do that, you should reflect on why that is, because that’s most likely your greatest impediment to getting more of what you want out of life.”

— Ray Dalio

428. “There is nothing more important than understanding how reality works and how to deal with it. The state of mind you bring to this process makes all the difference. 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.”

— Ray Dalio

429. “Avoid staying too distant. You need to know your people extremely well, provide and receive regular feedback, and have quality discussions.”

— Ray Dalio

430. “Acknowledging your weaknesses is not the same as surrendering to them. It’s the first step toward overcoming them. The pains you are feeling are “growing pains” that will test your character and reward you as you push through them.”

— Ray Dalio

431. “If you are open-minded enough and determined, you can get virtually anything you want. So I certainly don’t want to dissuade you from going after whatever you want. At the same time, I urge you to reflect on whether what you are going after is consistent with your nature. Whatever your nature is, there are many paths that will suit you, so don’t fixate on just one. Should a particular path close, all you have to do is find another good one consistent with what you’re like.”

— Ray Dalio

432. “Be clear on whether you are arguing or seeking to understand, and think about which is most appropriate based on your and others’ believability.”

— Ray Dalio

433. “Looking back on getting fired from Apple in 1985, Steve Jobs said, “It was awful-tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did.”

— Ray Dalio

434. “Wekanesses don’t matter if you find solutions to them.”

— Ray Dalio

435. “Evolving is life’s greatest accomplishment and its greatest reward.”

— Ray Dalio

436. “Go to the pain rather than avoid it. If you don’t let up on yourself and instead become comfortable always operating with some level of pain, you will evolve at a faster pace.”

— Ray Dalio

437. “Get rid of irrelevant details so that the essential things and the relationships between them stand out.”

— Ray Dalio

438. “There is almost always a good path that you just haven’t figured out yet, so look for it until you find it rather than settle for the choice that is then apparent to you.”

— Ray Dalio

439. “Most people do not look thoughtfully at the facts and draw their conclusions by objectively weighing the evidence. Instead, they make their decisions based on what their deep-seated subconscious mind wants and then they filter the evidence to make it consistent with those desires.”

— Ray Dalio

440. “I didn’t value experience as much as character, creativity, and common sense, which I suppose was related to my having started Bridgewater two years out of school myself, and my belief that having an ability to figure things out is more important than having specific knowledge of how to do something.”

— Ray Dalio

441. “It is more practical to be honest about one’s uncertainties, mistakes, and weaknesses than to pretend they don’t exist. It is also more important to have good challengers than good followers.”

— Ray Dalio

442. “I learned that creative genius and insanity can be quite close to each other, that the same chemistry that creates insights can cause distortions, and that being stuck in one’s own head is terribly dangerous.”

— Ray Dalio

443. “A thorough and accurate diagnosis, while more time-consuming, will pay huge dividends in the future.”

— Ray Dalio

444. “Closed-minded people focus much more on being understood than on understanding others. When people disagree, they tend to be quicker to assume that they aren’t being understood than to consider whether they’re the ones who are not understanding the other person’s perspective. Open-minded people always feel compelled to see things through others’ eyes.”

— Ray Dalio

445. “It’ll be decades – and maybe never – before the computer can replicate many of the things that the brain can do in terms of imagination, synthesis, and creativity. That’s because the brain comes genetically programmed with millions of years of abilities honed through evolution. The “science” of decision making that underlies many computer systems remains much less valuable than the “art.”

— Ray Dalio

446. “Your part in an employee’s personal evolution begins with a frank assessment of their strengths and weaknesses, followed by a plan for how their weaknesses can be mitigated either through training or by switching to a different job that taps into their strengths and preferences.”

— Ray Dalio

447. “Liberal” had ceased to mean being in favor of progress and had come to mean “paying people not to work.”

— Ray Dalio

448. “Communicate the plan clearly and have clear metrics conveying whether you are progressing according to it.”

— Ray Dalio

449. “Focusing strictly on the logical cause-effect relationships was what allowed us to see what was really going on.”

— Ray Dalio

450. “I’ve often thought that parents and schools overemphasize the value of having the right answers all the time. It seems to me that the best students in school tend to be the worst at learning from their mistakes, because they have been conditioned to associate mistakes with failure instead of opportunity.”

— Ray Dalio