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

402. “I now realize that nature optimizes for the whole, not for the individual, but most people judge good and bad based only on how it affects them.”

— Ray Dalio

403. “Raising the probability of being right is valuable no matter what your probability of being right already is.”

— Ray Dalio

404. “Humility is as important, or even more important, as having the strengths yourself.”

— Ray Dalio

405. “While it may seem counterintuitive, clearing your head can be the best way to make progress.”

— Ray Dalio

406. “I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

408. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

410. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

412. “Be Radically Open-Minded.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

415. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

417. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

423. “Having everyone randomly probe everyone else is an unproductive waste of time.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

426. “Watch out for people who think it’s embarrassing not to know. They’re likely to be more concerned with appearances than actually achieving the goal; this can lead to ruin over time.”

— Ray Dalio

427. “Go back before you go forward.”

— Ray Dalio

428. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

430. “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

431. “I have come to realize that bad times coupled with good reflections provide some of the best lessons, and not just about business but also about relationships.”

— Ray Dalio

432. “Remember that when it comes to assessing people, the two biggest mistakes you can make are being overconfident in your assessment and failing to get in sync on it.”

— Ray Dalio

433. “Don’t lower the bar.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

435. “Power should lie in the reasoning, not the position, of the individual.”

— Ray Dalio

436. “Buddhist monks who had practiced more than ten thousand hours of meditation, researchers at the University of Wisconsin measured significantly higher levels of gamma waves in their brains; these waves are associated with perception and problem solving.”

— Ray Dalio

437. “History has shown that we shouldn’t rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.”

— Ray Dalio

438. “Avoid setting goals based on what you think you can achieve.”

— Ray Dalio

439. “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

440. “While it’s easier to avoid confrontations in the short run, the consequences of doing so can be massively destructive in the long term. It’s critical that conflicts actually get resolved – not through superficial compromise, but through seeking the important, accurate conclusions.”

— Ray Dalio

441. “You should be able to delegate the details.”

— Ray Dalio

442. “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

443. “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

444. “Most people fight seeing what’s true when it’s not what they want it to be. That’s bad, because it is more important to understand and deal with the bad staff since the good staff will take care of itself.”

— Ray Dalio

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

— Ray Dalio

446. “Most people initially find this process very uncomfortable. While most appreciate it intellectually, they typically are challenged by it emotionally because it requires them to separate themselves from their ego’s attachment to being right and try to see what they have a hard time seeing.”

— Ray Dalio

447. “El trabajo y las relaciones significativos eran, y son, mis objetivos principales, y lo subordinaba todo a ellos. Ganar dinero era una consecuencia accidental de lo anterior.”

— Ray Dalio

448. “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

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

— Ray Dalio

450. “Seeing one of the richest and most accomplished men on the planet lose everything made a huge impression on me.”

— Ray Dalio