Best Ray Dalio Quotes

#1. More than anything else, what differentiates people who live up to their potential from those who don't is a willingness to look at themselves and others objectively

Ray Dalio

#2. Ask yourself whether you have earned the right to have an opinion. Opinions are easy to produce, so bad ones abound. Knowing that you don't know something is nearly as valuable as knowing it. The worst situation is thinking you know something when you don't.

Ray Dalio

#3. A beautiful deleveraging balances the three options. In other words, there is a certain amount of austerity, there is a certain amount of debt restructuring, and there is a certain amount of printing of money. When done in the right mix, it isn't dramatic.

Ray Dalio

#4. The best advice I can give you is to ask yourself what do you want, then ask 'what is true' - and then ask yourself 'what should be done about it.' I believe that if you do this you will move much faster towards what you want to get out of life than if you don't!

Ray Dalio

#5. I can be stressed, or tired, and I can go into a meditation and it all just flows off of me. I'll come out of it refreshed and centered and that's how I'll feel and it'll carry through the day.

Ray Dalio

#6. I pay about a third in taxes, I give away about a third, and I follow the law.

Ray Dalio

#7. If inflation-adjusted interest rates decline in a given country, its currency is likely to decline.

Ray Dalio

#8. If you can stare hard at your problems, they almost always shrink or disappear, because you almost always find a better way of dealing with them than if you don't face them head on. The more difficult the problem, the more important it is that you stare at it and deal with it.

Ray Dalio

#9. The more you think you know, the more closed-minded you'll be.

Ray Dalio

#10. The economy is like a machine.

Ray Dalio

#11. By and large, life will give you what you deserve and it doesn't give a damn what you like. So it is up to you to take full responsibility to connect what you want with what you need to do to get it, and then to do those things.

Ray Dalio

#12. If it didn't happen in your life before, then you're not paying attention you don't think it's possible. But almost all important events never happen in your life before.

Ray Dalio

#13. What matters most is that the people you work with share your values.

Ray Dalio

#14. When there is pain, the animal instinct is 'fight or flight' (i.e., to either strike back or run away) - reflect instead. When you can calm yourself down, thinking about the dilemma that is causing you pain will bring you to a higher level and enlighten you, leading to progress.

Ray Dalio

#15. When you're centered, your emotions are not hijacking you.

Ray Dalio

#16. I believe that one of the best ways of getting at truth is reflecting with others who have opposing views and who share your interest in finding the truth rather than being proven right

Ray Dalio

#17. I also believe that everyone needs to think independently and make their own decisions on what makes the most sense.

Ray Dalio

#18. I believe that we all get rewarded and punished according to whether we operate in harmony or in conflict with nature's laws, and that all societies will succeed or fail in the degrees that they operate consistently with these laws.

Ray Dalio

#19. Credit is a promise to deliver money. It will produce GDP but you'll create credit ... So you reach a certain point that that you can't do that anymore ... There are choices. And how do we best support, apportion the money? How much is going to be transferred?

Ray Dalio

#20. Demand is best measured in terms of spending. You know, I think in traditional economics, it's a mistake to measure it in terms of the quantity of goods.

Ray Dalio

#21. People who confuse what they wish were true with what is really true create distorted pictures of reality that make it impossible for them to make the best choices.

Ray Dalio

#22. Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions.

Ray Dalio

#23. When people get at each other's throat, the rich and the poor and the Left and the Right and so on, and you have a basic breakdown, that becomes very threatening.

Ray Dalio

#24. In China anything less than 6% growth is a recession meaning that it also causes financial problems and it's disruptive and it's a problem.

Ray Dalio

#25. Nature gave us pain as a messaging device to tell us that we are approaching, or that we have exceeded, our limits in some way.

Ray Dalio

#26. If you don't own Gold, you know neither history nor economics.

Ray Dalio

#27. There is an excellent correlation between giving society what it wants and making money, and almost no correlation between the desire to make money and how much money one makes.

Ray Dalio

#28. It is a law of nature that you must do difficult things to gain strength and power. As with working out, after a while you make the connection between doing difficult things and the benefits you get from doing them, and you come to look forward to doing these difficult things.

Ray Dalio

#29. In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.

Ray Dalio

#30. The big question is: When will the term structure of interest rates change? That's the question to be worried about.

Ray Dalio

#31. I'm going to give away a lot more than half my money. I'd be happy to give that to the government if the government put together programs that were like I'm giving away to charity, in which I believe the money is effectively used to help people.

Ray Dalio

#32. To be successful, we need everyone to think independently and work through disagreement to decide what's best.

Ray Dalio

#33. Radical transparency fosters goodness in so many ways for the same reasons that bad things are more likely to take place behind closed doors.

Ray Dalio

#34. I worry about another leg down in the economies causing social disruption because deleveragings can be very painful - it depends on how they're managed.

Ray Dalio

#35. To make money in the markets, you have to think independently and be humble.

Ray Dalio

#36. People who worry about looking good typically hide what they don't know and hide their weaknesses, so they never learn how to properly deal with them and these weaknesses remain impediments in the future.

Ray Dalio

#37. When you think that it's too hard, remember that in the long run, doing the things that will make you successful is a lot easier than being unsuccessful

Ray Dalio

#38. I believe that understanding what is good is obtained by looking at the way the world works and figuring out how to operate in harmony with it to help it evolve.

Ray Dalio

#39. Meditation, more than any other factor, has been the reason for what success I've had.

Ray Dalio

#40. Almost everything is like a machine.

Ray Dalio

#41. For me, the best things in life - meaningful work, meaningful relationships, interesting experiences, good food, sleep, music, ideas, sex, and other basic needs and pleasures - are not, past a certain point, materially improved upon by having a lot of money.

Ray Dalio

#42. I have found that by looking at what is rewarded and punished, and why, universally - i.e., in nature as well as in humanity - I have been able to learn more about what is "good" and "bad" than by listening to most people's views about good and bad.

Ray Dalio

#43. I was about twenty and the Beatles were meditating and I heard about it and they had a center in New York and I came to the center and I learned about it.

Ray Dalio

#44. Pull in your belt, spend less, and reduce debt.

Ray Dalio