What is harder than rock, or softer than water? Yet soft water hollows out hard rock. Persevere.

The saying contrasts apparent weakness with real efficacy: water seems soft and yielding, rock seems hard and unchangeable, yet over time water reshapes stone. The moral—“Persevere”—draws a practical lesson about endurance and incremental effort. It suggests that steady, repeated action can overcome obstacles that brute force cannot, and that time is an ally when one persists. In later moral and self-help traditions this image becomes a stock emblem of patience and tenacity, often detached from its classical setting and treated as a general maxim about character and achievement.