128 Naval Ravikant Quotes to Help You Navigate Through Life

Naval Ravikant is a successful investor who co-founded his own company, "AngelList." He has shared his insights on life and success, which people often seek because of his own success.

Naval Ravikant is one of the most formidable American entrepreneurs and investors. He has invested in over 200 successful entities running from Twitter to FourSquare.

His opinions on life, money, and investment, in general, have been some of the most sought-after due to his successful investment streak.

Ravikant has been vocal about the importance of living a focused and determined life in order to live the most successful life possible. If you need some inspiration on how your life can improve by leaps and bounds, here are 123 quotes on life from the man.

's quote: "No one is going to value you more than you value yourself." | Image: AmoDays

NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES ABOUT HAPPINESS

"That’s the fundamental delusion — that there is something out there that will make you happy forever." — Naval Ravikant

"True happiness comes out of peace. Peace comes out of many things, but it comes from fundamentally understanding yourself." — Naval Ravikant

"If you could literally just sit for 30 minutes and be happy, you are successful." — Naval Ravikant

"Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed." — Naval Ravikant

"The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a skill that you develop and a choice that you make. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: That’s the fundamental delusion — that there is something out there that will make you happy forever. | Image: AmoDays

"I don’t plan. I’m not a planner. I prefer to live in the moment and be free and to flow and to be happy." — Naval Ravikant

"You can neither give happiness nor receive it." — Naval Ravikant

SHORT NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES

"No one is going to value you more than you value yourself." — Naval Ravikant

"Happiness is a state where nothing is missing." — Naval Ravikant

"Guard your time. It’s all you have." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "True happiness comes out of peace. Peace comes out of many things, but it comes from fundamentally understanding yourself." | Image: AmoDays

"You do not want to compete; you want to be a market of one." — Naval Ravikant

"Guard your time. Forget the money." — Naval Ravikant

"Spend your time doing only what you can uniquely do." — Naval Ravikant

"Most of our suffering comes from avoidance." — Naval Ravikant

"You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Happiness is a state where nothing is missing." | Image: AmoDays

"You’ll do better work if you’re bored rather than busy." — Naval Ravikant

"The older the problem, the older the solution." — Naval Ravikant

"All the real benefits in life come from compound interest." — Naval Ravikant

"All the great endeavors in life are creative." — Naval Ravikant

"‘Consensus’ is just another way of saying ‘average.’" — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Guard your time. It’s all you have." | Image: AmoDays

"We are going from bread and circuses to cannabis and video games to psychedelics and VR." — Naval Ravikant

"Politics is the exercise of power without merit." — Naval Ravikant

"A good conference is a vacation that you take with really smart friends." — Naval Ravikant

"If you can’t delete an email without flinching or responding, you won’t scale." — Naval Ravikant

"Guilt is society’s voice speaking in your head." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "You do not want to compete, you want to be a market of one." | Image: AmoDays

"Self-image is the prison. Other people are the guards." — Naval Ravikant

"On what he wants to be remembered for: I don’t care. I’ll be dead." — Naval Ravikant

"We are biological machines programmed to survive and replicate. Happy is anti-evolution." — Naval Ravikant

"Is it so important to me that I be unhappy unless this goes my way?" — Naval Ravikant

"All real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Most of our suffering comes from avoidance." | Image: AmoDays

"When I look back on my life, I want to say I saw the world the way it was." — Naval Ravikant

"I can give glib answers all day long, but you have to discover your own personal answer." — Naval Ravikant

NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES ABOUT MONEY

"I don’t care how rich you are. I don’t care whether you’re a top Wall Street banker. If somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear and how to behave, you’re not a free person. You’re not actually rich." — Naval Ravikant

"Mentors won’t make you rich. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself." — Naval Ravikant

"You get paid for being right first, and to be first, you can’t wait for consensus." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Guard your time. Forget the money." | Image: AmoDays

"You want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous." — Naval Ravikant

NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES ON SUCCESS

"A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to create anything great." — Naval Ravikant

"People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing." — Naval Ravikant

"Earn with your mind, not your time." — Naval Ravikant

"As long as you can keep taking shots on goal, and you keep getting back up; eventually, you’ll get through. Just stick at it." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "You make your own luck if you stay at it long enough." | Image: AmoDays

"You should be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar." — Naval Ravikant

"Now, the main source of capital is how many “robots,” programmers, and machines you have working for you. Those are the ultimate force multipliers." — Naval Ravikant

"Whatever the geeks are doing in their garage on weekends is what the entire earth will be doing 20 years later as a mainstream thing." — Naval Ravikant

"Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true." — Naval Ravikant

"Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "I don’t care how rich you are. I don’t care whether you’re a top Wall Street banker. If somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear and how to behave, you’re not a free person. You’re not actually rich." | Image: AMoDays

"In a billion-dollar company, the employees aren’t working any harder than people in a million-dollar company. They’re just doing the right things." — Naval Ravikant

"We waste our time with short-term thinking and busywork. Warren Buffett spends a year deciding and a day acting. That act lasts decades." — Naval Ravikant

"You can escape competition through authenticity when you realize that no one can compete with you on being you. That would have been useless advice pre-internet. Post-internet, you can turn that into a career." — Naval Ravikant

"The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player." — Naval Ravikant

"Learn to sell. Learn to build. If you can do both, you will be unstoppable." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: Mentors won’t make you rich. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself. | Image: AmoDays

"If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day." — Naval Ravikant

"A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love. These things cannot be bought — they must be earned." — Naval Ravikant

"It’s a contradiction that we all deal with. That we all want to be successful people, but we also want to be happy people. The two of those run in almost diametric opposites to each other." — Naval Ravikant

"What you do, who you do with, and how you do it are way more important than how hard you work." — Naval Ravikant

"The people who succeed are irrationally passionate about something." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: A busy calendar and a busy mind will destroy your ability to create anything great. | Image: AmoDays

"Whether in commerce, science, or politics, history remembers the artists." — Naval Ravikant

"To the experts, what looks like hard work from the outside is play from the inside." — Naval Ravikant

"If you have an unswerving desire to do something, then usually you’ll get it." — Naval Ravikant

"If you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind." — Naval Ravikant

"Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one. But on all the other desires, let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: People spend too much time doing and not enough time thinking about what they should be doing. | Image: AmoDays

"You’re better off following your genuine intellectual curiosity rather than chasing whatever is hot right now." — Naval Ravikant

"The most successful entrepreneurs are authentic to who they are and what they uniquely can do." — Naval Ravikant

"All of the really successful people I know have a really strong action bias. They just do things." — Naval Ravikant

"If raising children was less rewarding than not doing it, the human race would have gone extinct." — Naval Ravikant

"When you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Earn with your mind, not your time." | Image: AmoDays

"Being a founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time, and in the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere." — Naval Ravikant

"On who he considers successful: to me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game; who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else." — Naval Ravikant

NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES ABOUT KNOWLEDGE

"Most of life is a search for who and what needs you the most." — Naval Ravikant

"Knowledge workers train, sprint, rest, and re-assess. Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately. Be impatient with actions but patient with results." — Naval Ravikant

"School, politics, sports, and games train us to compete against others. True rewards — wealth, knowledge, love, fitness, and equanimity — come from ignoring others and improving ourselves." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "As long as you can keep taking shots on goal, and you keep getting back up, eventually you’ll get through. Just stick at it." | Image: AmoDays

"The means of learning are abundant; it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce." — Naval Ravikant

"A vacation is a very expensive way to schedule the time to read a book in peace." — Naval Ravikant

"Given that the main function of universities these days is filtering and signaling, the best move is to get admitted to Stanford and then drop out." — Naval Ravikant

"My definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your actions." — Naval Ravikant

"Arm yourself with specific knowledge." — Naval Ravikant

"Knowledge is discovered by all of us, each adding to the whole. Wisdom is rediscovered by each of us, one at a time." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Whatever the geeks are doing in their garage on weekends is what the entire earth will be doing 20 years later as a mainstream thing." | Image: AmoDays

"People who try to look smart by pointing out obvious exceptions actually signal the opposite." — Naval Ravikant

"Develop ‘strategic incompetence’ – people won’t ask you to do things you hate to do if you’re bad at them." — Naval Ravikant

"If you’re smart, you should be able to figure out how to be happy. Otherwise, you’re not that smart." — Naval Ravikant

"Twitter is television for intellectuals." — Naval Ravikant

"I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read every single book out there." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true." | Image: AmoDays

"Involve groups in the creative process and you inevitably end up with a pile of pleasing, socially-acceptable lies. Contrast blockbuster movies with the great books." — Naval Ravikant

NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES ON LIFE

"You have one life. You’re dead for tens of billions of years, and you’re going to be dead for tens of billions of years." — Naval Ravikant

"The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself." — Naval Ravikant

"Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity." — Naval Ravikant

"Nothing you do is going to matter that much in the long run. Don’t take yourself so seriously." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Knowledge workers train, sprint, rest, and re-assess. Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately. Be impatient with actions but patient with results." | Image: AmoDays

"When you’re healthy you have 10000 needs, but when you’re sick you only have one need." — Naval Ravikant

"Sing the song that only you can sing, write the book that only you can write, build the product that only you can build… live the life that only you can live." — Naval Ravikant

"The modern struggle — Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising, up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games and addictive drugs." — Naval Ravikant

"You have to put in the time, but more important is the judgment. The direction you’re heading in matters more than how fast you drive." — Naval Ravikant

"The world doesn’t always give what you want, but it often gives you what you need." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "I would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until I absorb them rather than read every single book out there." | Image: AmoDays

"The phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is I just tell myself one word: accept." — Naval Ravikant

"I’m not afraid of death anymore. I don’t have the quest for immortality anymore." — Naval Ravikant

"The first rule of handling conflict is don’t hang around people who are constantly engaging in conflict." — Naval Ravikant

"We’re basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small backward star in a huge galaxy, which is in an absolutely staggeringly gigantic universe, which itself may be part of a gigantic multiverse." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "You should be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar." | Image: AmoDays

"Modern society will shame you for earning money, shame you for being happy, shame you for being raised well, shame you for having children, and ultimately, shame you for existing. It isn’t just religion that controls you by declaring you a sinner." — Naval Ravikant

"Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences… and then you die." — Naval Ravikant

"How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice." — Naval Ravikant

"If you eat, invest, and think according to what the ‘news’ advocates, you’ll end up nutritionally, financially, and morally bankrupt." — Naval Ravikant

"The most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram because they’re controlling the spread of information. They’re programming the culture." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you." | Image: AmoDays

"Trade money for time, not time for money. You’re going to run out of time first." — Naval Ravikant

"Play long-term games with long-term people. All returns in life, whether in wealth, relationships, or knowledge, come from compound interest." — Naval Ravikant

"I want to see truth. I want to see the world the way it is. Not through my filters. Not through my desires. Not through the way that other people want me to see it. And I want to accept it the way it is." — Naval Ravikant

"The fundamental insecurity — most people need faith in something — religion, government, academia. Few are comfortable with decentralized systems." — Naval Ravikant

"Today in society you get rewarded for creative work, for creating something brand new that society didn’t even know that it wanted, that it doesn’t yet know how to get, other than through you." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "The phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is I just tell myself one word: accept." | Image: AmoDays

"Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it; give it away. Pay it forward. Karma sort of works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project." — Naval Ravikant

"A contrarian isn’t one who always objects — that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform." — Naval Ravikant

"Asymmetric opportunities: Invest in startups. Start a company. Create a book, podcast, video. Create a (software) product. Go on many first dates. Go to a cocktail party. Read a Lindy book. Move to a big city. Buy Bitcoin." — Naval Ravikant

"Once you’ve truly controlled your own fate, for better or for worse, you’ll never let anyone else tell you what to do." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "I’m not afraid of death anymore. I don’t have the quest for immortality anymore." | Image: AmoDays

"We all get shaped by adversity. All the great things that have happened to me in my life that I consider highly positive… they all started with something highly negative." — Naval Ravikant

"No one can compete with you on being you, no one can compete with me on being me, so when I think about what my profession, what my job, what my work is, it’s just being me." — Naval Ravikant

"You’re meant to do something. You’re not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. You should self-actualize. You should do what you are meant to do." — Naval Ravikant

"The people with the best judgment are among the least emotional." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "You have one life. You’re dead for tens of billions of years, and you’re going to be dead for tens of billions of years." | Image: AmoDays

"The best way, perhaps the only way, to change others is to become an example." — Naval Ravikant

"If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it’s a distraction. Keep looking." — Naval Ravikant

"Politics is sports writ large — pick a side, rally the tribe, exchange stories confirming bias, hurl insults and threats at the other side." — Naval Ravikant

"It is the mark of a charlatan to explain a simple concept in a complex way." — Naval Ravikant

"More drugs are taken to quiet the mind than to heal the body." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "The greatest superpower is the ability to change yourself." | Image: AmoDays

"You have social statisticians, scientists, and researchers in lab coats, literally the best minds of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news. And if you fall for it, if you get addicted. your brain will get destroyed." — Naval Ravikant

"Suffering is a moment of clarity when you can no longer deny the truth of a situation and are forced into uncomfortable change. Inside suffering is the seed of change." — Naval Ravikant

"Humans are always signaling. Rather than really looking at yourself, you’re looking at how other people look at you." — Naval Ravikant

"It’s kind of a disease — social media is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world." — Naval Ravikant

"Do everything you were going to do, but with less angst, less suffering, less emotion. Everything takes time." — Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant's quote: "Most of modern life, all our diseases, are diseases of abundance, not diseases of scarcity." | Image: AmoDays

NAVAL RAVIKANT QUOTES ON MEDITATION

"The modern mind is overstimulated and the modern body is understimulated and overfed. Meditation, exercise, and fasting restore an ancient balance." — Naval Ravikant

"Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit." — Naval Ravikant

"A happy, calm, and peaceful person will make better decisions. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind." — Naval Ravikant

"On meditation: It’s self-therapy. Instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you’re listening to yourself." — Naval Ravikant

" Naval Ravikant's quote: Nothing you do is going to matter that much in the long run. Don’t take yourself so seriously." | Image: AmoDays

Along our personal journey to becoming the best version of ourselves, we can find role models and inspiration from people who have achieved the success we desire, and Naval Ravikant is one of those role models.

His quotes are an inspiring force to help us reach our dreams, but they will not be effective unless we make the effort to change our lives daily. So go forth and reach your dreams, and let these quotes be the catalyst you need to make your dreams a reality.

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