“If you start wielding a hammer, then all your problems look like nails. And maybe they’re not. Maybe it's more subtle than that. And so your toolkit has to be able to morph into what is necessary for what it is that you confront at that moment.”

Source: The Invention of Hugo Cabret

Source: On the documentary Ruben Blades Is Not My Name in "Inside Ruben Blades: New Documentary Showcases the Man Behind the Music" https://afropop.org/articles/inside-ruben-blades-new-documentary-showcases-the-man-behind-the-music in Afropop Worldwide (2018 Apr 10)

Alternate version: If you don't have a hammer, you don't want anything to look like a nail.
Of Paradise and Power, p. 26
According to Kagan, this is a variation of the proverb "When you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails." (p. 25 of the same book)

Variant: What looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe ittake a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.
Source: Handle with Care

Variant: Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.
Source: Handle with Care

Sam Harris, "Death and the Present Moment", speech at the Global Atheist Convention (April 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ITTxTCz4Ums&t=24m27s
2010s

Alec Lightwood and Jace Heronale, pg. 535
The Mortal Instruments, City of Heavenly Fire (2014)