Top 15 Ray Dalio Quotes

You only have so much time and energy; make sure you are investing them in exploring the problems that, if fixed, will yield you the biggest returns. But at the same time, make sure you spend enough time with the small problems to make sure they're not symptoms of larger ones.

If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential

I learned that if you work hard and creatively, you can have just about anything you want, but not everything you want. Maturity is the ability to reject good alternatives in order to pursue even better ones.

Look for people who have lots of great questions. Smart people are the ones who ask the most thoughtful questions, as opposed to thinking they have all the answers. Great questions are a much better indicator of future success than great answers.

the happiest people discover their own nature and match their life to it.

It is far more common for people to allow ego to stand in the way of learning.

Having the basics — a good bed to sleep in, good relationships, good food, and good sex — is most important, and those things don’t get much better when you have a lot of money or much worse when you have less. And the people one meets at the top aren’t necessarily more special than those one meets at the bottom or in between.

Listening to uninformed people is worse than having no answers at all.

I just want to be right — I don’t care if the right answer comes from me.

Pain + Reflection = Progress

Truth - more precisely, an accurate understanding of reality - is the essential foundation for producing good outcomes.

If you can’t successfully do something, don’t think you can tell others how it should be done

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. You will think you have failed — but that won’t be true unless you give up.

Because our educational system is hung up on precision, the art of being good at approximations is insufficiently valued. This impedes conceptual thinking.

Imagine that in order to have a great life you have to cross a dangerous jungle. You can stay safe where you are and have an ordinary life, or you can risk crossing the jungle to have a terrific life. How would you approach that choice? Take a moment to think about it because it is the sort of choice that, in one form or another, we all have to make.