Here are two thoughts on water … I wonder if Dumas' René d'Herblay might have a third to add?
Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it. ... be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle ... Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend. — Bruce Lee
The theorem to be known appeared to me as some stretch of ... hard marl, resisting penetration ... the tide rises in silence, nothing seems to happen, to move, the water so far off one can barely hear it ... yet it finally surrounds the resistant substance ... submerged and dissolved by some more or less vast theory, going well beyond the results originally to be established. — Alexandre Grothendieck