Top 500 Ray Dalio Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

404. “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

405. “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

406. “Knowing how to deal well with your setbacks is as important as knowing how to move forward.”

— 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. “Helping people acquire skills is easy- it’s typically a matter of providing them with appropriate training. Improvements in abilities are more difficult but essential to expanding what a person can be responsible for over time. And changing someone’s values is something you should never count on. p422.”

— Ray Dalio

409. “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

410. “Be an imperfectionist. Perfectionists spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of the important things.”

— Ray Dalio

411. “Recognize that while most people prefer compliments, accurate criticism is more valuable. You’ve heard the expression “no pain no gain.”

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

— Ray Dalio

415. “Don’t let fears of what others think of you stand in your way. You must be willing to do things in the unique ways you think are best – and to open-mindedly reflect on the feedback that comes inevitably as a result of being that way.”

— Ray Dalio

416. “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

417. “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

418. “To help you stay centered and effective, pretend that your life is a martial art or a game, the object of which is to get around a challenge and reach a goal. Once you accept its rules, you’ll get used to the discomfort that comes with the constant frustration.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

420. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

422. “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

423. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

425. “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

426. “If you don’t mind being wrong on the way to being right you’ll learn a lot –.”

— Ray Dalio

427. “Debating takes time, and that time increases exponentially depending on the number of people participating in the discussion, so you have to carefully choose the right people in the right numbers to suit the decision that needs to be made. In any discussion try to limit the participation to those whom you value most in light of your objectives. The worst way to pick people is based on whether their conclusions align with yours.”

— Ray Dalio

428. “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

429. “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

430. “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

431. “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

432. “Keeping people in jobs they are not suited for is terrible for them because it allows them to live in a false reality while holding back their personal evolution, and it is terrible for the community because it compromises the meritocracy and everyone pays the price.”

— Ray Dalio

433. “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

434. “I saw that to do exceptionally well you have to push your limits and that, if you push your limits, you will crash and it will hurt a lot.”

— Ray Dalio

435. “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

436. “Over the decades since, I’ve repeatedly seen policymakers deliver such assurances immediately before currency devaluations, so I learned not to believe government policymakers when they assure you that they won’t let a currency devaluation happen. The more strongly they make those assurances, the more desperate the situation probably is, so the more likely it is that a devaluation will take place.”

— Ray Dalio

437. “Everyone has at least one big thing that stands in the way of their success; find yours and deal with it.”

— Ray Dalio

438. “Georgi Plekhanov’s classic On the Role of the Individual in History.”

— Ray Dalio

439. “Don’t mistake possibilities for probabilities.”

— Ray Dalio

440. “An organization is a community with a set of shared values and goals. Its morale and smooth functioning should always take precedence over your need to be right – and besides, you could be wrong.”

— Ray Dalio

441. “My ultimate goal is to create a machine that works so well that I can just sit back and watch beauty happen.”

— Ray Dalio

442. “Don’t mistake a cause of a problem with the real problem.”

— Ray Dalio

443. “Play jazz with people with whom you are compatible but who will also challenge you.”

— Ray Dalio

444. “Recognize that performance in school doesn’t tell you much about whether a person has the values and abilities you are looking for. Largely because they are the easiest to measure, memory and processing speed tend to be the abilities that determine success in school, so school performance is an excellent gauge of these qualities.”

— Ray Dalio

445. “Recognize that experience creates internalized learning that book learning can’t replace.”

— Ray Dalio

446. “If you can be open with your weaknesses it will make you freer and will help you deal with them better. I urge you to not be embarrassed about your problems, recognizing that everyone has them.”

— Ray Dalio

447. “Find out who is responsible for whatever you are seeking to understand and then ask them. Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.”

— Ray Dalio

448. “I have seen people who agree on the major issues waste hours arguing over details.”

— Ray Dalio

449. “I myself find the excitement, lower risk, and educational value of achieving a deep understanding of cause-effect relationships much more appealing than a reliance on algorithms I don’t understand, so I am drawn to that path.”

— Ray Dalio

450. “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