Water Metaphor Quotes

Water is the softest of all things, yet it is the most powerful. The ocean patiently allows all things to flow into it. It is always flexible. The Tao is not about grasping, but allowing, like water.

I write a woman's oaths in water.

Nothing in the world is more flexible and yielding than water. Yet when it attacks the firm and the strong, none can withstand it, because they have no way to change it. So the flexible overcome the adamant, the yielding overcome the forceful. Everyone knows this, but no one can do it.

Words are humanity's greatest natural resource, but most of us have trouble figuring out how to put them together. Words aren't cheap. They are very precious. They are like water, which gives life and growth and refreshment, but because it has always been abundant, we treat it cheaply. We waste it; we pollute it, and doctor it. Later we blame the quality of the water because we have misused it.

Time was a face on the water, and like the great river before them, it did nothing but flow.

To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.

A river, though, has so many things to say that it is hard to know what it says to each of us.

The ties of blood," said Spider, "are stronger than water." Water's not strong," objected Fat Charlie.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

The water doesn't know how old you are.

That’s one way of looking at it. I prefer to look at it another way—which is that if they are persistent enough, even tiny drops of water, over time, can change the rock forever. And it will never change back.

Lakes, rivers, streams...all are water and all travel to the same destination. So it is with religion.

IF YOUR OPPONENT strikes with fire, counter with water, becoming completely fluid and free-flowing. Water, by its nature, never collides with or breaks against anything. On the contrary, it swallows up any attack harmlessly.

Time jumps. It leaps. It pours away like water through fingers.

Arguments could fill a marriage like water, running through everything, always, with no taste or color but lots of noise.

If you handed [character] a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water.

The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father.

Romance often begins by a splashing waterfall and ends over a leaky sink.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

Evil is like water, it abounds, is cheap, soon fouls, but runs itself clear of taint.

Time is water, and the Venetians conquered both by building a city on water, and framed time with their canals. Or tamed time. Or fenced it in. Or caged it.

God is the water, and you are the faucet.