“Man [is a] tool-making animal.”

— Benjamin Franklin

Quoted by James Boswell in The Life of Samuel Johnson, April 7, 1778 https://books.google.de/books?id=nuINAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA199&dq=tool-making (1791).
Decade unclear

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Man [is a] tool-making animal." by Benjamin Franklin?

Benjamin Franklin 183

American author, printer, political theorist, politician, p… 1706–1790

Related quotes

“Man is a tool-using animal…Without tools he is nothing, with tools he is all.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Bk. I, ch. 5.
1830s, Sartor Resartus (1833–1834)

“You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him.”

John Ruskin book The Stones of Venice

Volume II, chapter VI, section 12.
The Stones of Venice (1853)
Context: You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. Men were not intended to work with the accuracy of tools, to be precise and perfect in all their actions. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their fingers measure degrees like cog-wheels, and their arms strike curves like compasses, you must unhumanize them. All the energy of their spirits must be given to make cogs and compasses of themselves…. On the other hand, if you will make a man of the working creature, you cannot make him a tool. Let him but begin to imagine, to think, to try to do anything worth doing; and the engine-turned precision is lost at once. Out come all his roughness, all his dulness, all his incapability; shame upon shame, failure upon failure, pause after pause: but out comes the whole majesty of him also; and we know the height of it only when we see the clouds settling upon him.

“Man can acquire accomplishments or he can become an animal, whichever he wants. God makes the animals, man makes himself.”

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg (1742–1799) German scientist, satirist

F 49
Aphorisms (1765-1799), Notebook F (1776-1779)

“A man, a real man, must never be an agent, a tool, or a gambler—acting for himself or for others—he must employ such. A real man—a financier—was never a tool. He used tools. He created. He led.”

Theodore Dreiser book The Financier

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. VI

“Man is an animal that diddles, and there is no animal that diddles but man.”

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) American author, poet, editor and literary critic

" Diddling: Considered As One Of The Exact Sciences http://www.classicreader.com/read.php/sid.6/bookid.1390/"; first published as "Raising the Wind" in Saturday Courier (1843-10-14).