“Tools arm the man. One can well say that man is capable of bringing forth a world; he lacks only the necessary apparatus, the corresponding armature of his sensory tools. The beginning is there. Thus the principle of a warship lies in the idea of the shipbuilder, who is able to incorporate this thought by making himself into a gigantic machine, as it were, through a mass of men and appropriate tools and materials. Thus the idea of a moment often required monstrous organs, monstrous masses of materials, and man is therefore a potential, if not an actual creator.”

Bk. 1, ch. 7, sct. 1
The Ministry of Fear (1943)

Source: The Financier (1912), Ch. VI

On Practice (1937)
Original: (zh-CN) 人们要想得到工作的胜利即得到预想的结果，一定要使自己的思想合于客观外界的规律性，如果不合，就会在实践中失败。人们经过失败之后，也就从失败取得教训，改正自己的思想使之适合于外界的规律性，人们就能变失败为胜利，所谓“失败者成功之母”，“吃一堑长一智”，就是这个道理。

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

As A Man Thinketh (1902)
Variant: Mind is the Master Power that molds and makes, And we are mind. And ever more we take the tool of thought, and shaping what we will, bring forth a thousand joys, or a thousand ills. We think in secret, and it comes to pass, environment, is but our looking glass.

Source: An Essay on Aristocratic Radicalism (1889), p. 20

Alcibiades I

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