The meaning of this famous saying is: Time passes as fast as water, so you should read a lot of books in order to do something good. In fact, it is to ask people to cherish their time and work hard to achieve a career.

This sentence is a famous saying by Yan Zhitui, an educator and writer in the Southern and Northern Dynasties.

Yan Zhitui (531-about 591): Zi Jie, Han nationality, originally from Langye Linyi (now Linyi City, Shandong Province), and was born in Jiankang (now Nanjing City, Jiangsu Province), a noble family House of bureaucracy. The grandson of Yan Jianyuan, the censor of the Southern Qi Dynasty, and the son of Yan Xie, who proposed to join the army in Nanliang. An ancient Chinese writer and educator who lived from the Northern and Southern Dynasties to the Sui Dynasty. He is the author of "Yan Family Instructions", which has an important influence on the history of the development of family education. It is an important prose work in the late Northern Dynasties; "Guan Wo Sheng Fu" contained in the biography of "Book of Northern Qi" is also a famous piece of fu.