Top 33 Ray Dalio Quotes

There is a strong tendency to get used to and accept very bad things that would be shocking if seen with fresh eyes.

I believe that the biggest problem that humanity faces is an ego sensitivity to finding out whether one is right or wrong and identifying what one’s strengths and weaknesses are.

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.

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.

When growth is slower-than-expected, stocks go down. When inflation is higher-than-expected, bonds go down. When inflation is lower-than-expected, bonds go up.

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.

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.

Constantly probe the people who report to you, and encourage them to probe you.

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

An economy is not a complicated thing; it just has a lot of moving parts.

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.

Know what your people are like, and make sure they do their jobs excellently.

Treat your life like a game.

Almost everything is like a machine.

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.

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

There is slow growth, but it is positive slow growth. At the same time, ratios of debt-to-incomes go down. That’s a beautiful deleveraging.

Competitiveness is really what it costs you per man-hour to get you what you want. In other words, there’s an education level that plays into the mix and so if it’s inexpensive to buy an hour of real good education in places like China versus the U.S., that factors in.

Nature is a machine. The family is a machine. The life cycle is like a machine.

I think so many people are reactive… they see things in a short term way they’re right up against it.

Maintain ‘baseball cards’ and/or ‘believability matrixes’ for your people. Imagine if you had baseball cards that showed all the performance stats. You could see what they did well and poorly and call on the right people to play the right positions in a very transparent way.

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.

I notice a difference from the moment I meditate.

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.

The world is still in deleveraging.

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

So how does the machine work that you have a financial crisis? How does deleveraging work – what is the nature of that machine? And what is human nature, and how do you raise a community of people to run a business?

Look at what caused people to make a lot of money and you will see that usually it is in proportion to their production of what the society wanted.

I don’t get caught up in the moment.

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.

There are two main drivers of asset class returns – inflation and growth.

I’m just saying that if you understand how the economic machine works, it just works like a machine. There are cause-effect relationships.

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?