Water is a common chemical substance, that is essential to all known forms of life. In typical usage water refers only to its liquid form or state, but the substance also has the solid state, ice, and gaseous state, water vapor. Water covers 71% of Earth's surface as well as below ground in aquifers and in the air as vapor, clouds, and precipitation.

Sourced

• All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
  • Ecclesiastes 1:7

• Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it: thou greatly enrichest it with the river of God, which is full of water: thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided for it.
  • Psalms 65:9, Authorized Version

• Water is a very good servant, but it is a cruell maister.
  • William Bullein in Bulwarke of Defence against All Sicknesses (1562)

• Don't get set into one form, adapt it and build your own, and let it grow, be like water. Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless — like water. Now you put water in a cup, it becomes the cup; You put water into a bottle it becomes the bottle; You put it in a teapot it becomes the teapot. Water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.
  • Bruce Lee as quoted in Bruce Lee : A Warrior's Journey (2000)

• Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream. There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be plunged in his deepest reveries — stand that man on his legs, set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water, if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor. Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded forever.
  • Herman Melville in Moby-Dick (1851), Ch. 1, Loomings

• 天下莫柔弱於水。而攻堅強者、莫之能勝。以其無以易之。(Original: Chinese)
  • Translation: There is nothing softer and weaker than water,
    And yet there is nothing better for attacking hard and strong things.
    For this reason there is no substitute for it.
  • Laozi, Tao te Ching, Ch. 78.

• Water, water, every where,
  And all the boards did shrink;
  Water, water, every where,
  Nor any drop to drink.
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

• From a drop of water, a logician could infer the possibility of an Atlantic or a Niagara without having seen or heard of one or the other.
  • Arthur Conan Doyle, A Study in Scarlet, Chapter 2, "The Science of Deduction"

Unsourced

• And all the air is filled with pleasant noise of waters.
  • Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

• It may be belived that many are ignorant of the taste of water.
  • -Westminster- Review

• Somewhere, behind space and time,
  Is wetter water, slimier slime.
  • Rupert Brooke

• His answer trickled through my head
  Like water through a sieve.
  • Lewis Carroll

• A lake carries you into recesses of feeling otherwise impenetrable.
  • William Wordsworth

• I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.
  • Henry David Thoreau

• I have never seen a river that I could not love. Moving water…has a fascinating vitality. It has power and grace and associations. It has a thousand colors and a thousand shapes, yet it follows laws so definite that the tiniest stream is an exact replica of a great river.
  • Roderick Haig-Brown

• Only a fool tests the depth of the water with both feet.
  • African Proverb

• Rivers are roads which move, and which carry us whither we desire to go.
  • Blaise Pascal