A bad workman never gets a good tool. [ Proverb ]

Wouldst thou wisely, and with pleasure,
Pass the days of life's short measure,
From the slow one counsel take,
But a tool of him never make;
Ne'er as friend the swift one know,
Nor the constant one as foe. [ Schiller ]

Joy in one's work is the consummate tool. [ Phillips Brooks ]

A sharp tongue is the only edge-tool that grows keener with constant use. [ Washington Irving ]

A tool is but the extension of a man's hand, and a machine is but a complex tool. And he that invents a machine augments the power of a man and the well-being of mankind. [ Henry Ward Beecher ]

There is a hand that has no heart in it, there is a claw or paw, a flipper or fin, a bit of wet cloth to take hold of, a piece of unbaked dough on the cook's trencher, a cold clammy thing we recoil from, or greedy clutch with the heat of sin, which we drop as a burning coal. What a scale from the talon to the horn of plenty, is this human palmleaf! Sometimes it is what a knifeshaped, thin-bladed tool we dare not grasp, or like a poisonous thing we shake off, or unclean member, which, white as it may look, we feel polluted by! [ C. A. Bartol ]