Genuinely Thoreau, and unusually easy to pin down. The sentence is in Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Ticknor and Fields, 1854), in the opening chapter “Economy,” on pages 41–42 — where it reads “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.” ↗ The circulating version simply drops the opening “But lo!”
“Men have become the tools of their tools” Henry D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), 41–42. Original wording: "But lo! men have become the tools of their tools." Verified against the 1854 first edition. — Quotle.info
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Provenance
The source
Work
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
Chapter
“Economy” — pages 41–42 (first-edition running head “Shelter”)
First published
9 August 1854 — Ticknor and Fields, Boston
Original wording
“But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”
The very simplicity and nakedness of man’s life in the primitive ages imply this advantage, at least, that they left him still but a sojourner in nature. When he was refreshed with food and sleep, he contemplated his journey again. He dwelt, as it were, in a tent in this world, and was either threading the valleys, or crossing the plains, or climbing the mountain-tops. But lo! men have become the tools of their tools. The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper. We now no longer camp as for a night, but have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.
Walden, “Economy”
Text as given in standard reading editions; the 1854 first edition sets a few points of punctuation differently (it prints “mountain tops” unhyphenated). The famous sentence begins on page 41 and the paragraph runs on to page 42.
Quote Investigator ↗ concludes that Thoreau deserves credit, citing Walden 1854 at quote pages 41 and 42, and traces the line onward through an 1877 article in the Dublin University Magazine and H. L. Mencken’s 1942 A New Dictionary of Quotations, which lists it under “Machine” as “H. D. THOREAU: Walden, 1854.”
Wikipedia ↗ gives the book’s first publication as 9 August 1854 by Ticknor and Fields, with “Economy” as its first and longest chapter.
✓Public domain
Walden was first published on 9 August 1854 by Ticknor and Fields ↗ in Boston — far earlier than the 1931 cut-off that governs U.S. copyright today — so the book and this sentence are in the public domain. Thoreau wrote in English, so no translation rights are involved; Project Gutenberg distributes the text as public domain in the USA ↗.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What actually gets misattributed here
The attribution to Thoreau is solid. What goes wrong is the wording — and the company the line keeps, because two similar-sounding sayings from the 20th century are constantly mixed in with it.
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Wording“People / we have become the tools of our tools” Paraphrase
Thoreau wrote “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.” Wikiquote flags that statements declaring “We are / have become / are becoming ‘the tools of our tools’” were derived from this passage ↗ rather than written by him; Quote Investigator records a 1990 sociology book quoting Thoreau as saying people “have become the tools of their tools” ↗.
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Adjacent sayingMarshall McLuhan Different line
“We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us” is routinely hung on McLuhan, but it appeared in a March 1967 Saturday Review article about McLuhan written by his friend John M. Culkin — and Quote Investigator reports no evidence that McLuhan claimed coinage ↗. Culkin popularised it rather than coined it: QI finds a “tools” wording already in circulation in February 1965, and credits Churchill’s 1943 “buildings” remark as the origin of the whole family. It is a separate saying from Thoreau’s, not a restatement of it.
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Ancestor of the look-alikeWinston Churchill Related, not the same
Debating the rebuilding of the bombed House of Commons in 1943, Churchill said “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” — which Quote Investigator treats as the template for that later family of sayings ↗. Thematically close to Thoreau; a different sentence, by a different man, nearly ninety years later.
✓Thoreau really wrote it, in 1854, and you can read it on page 41 of the first edition ↗. All that later hands removed were the two words that opened it: “But lo!”
Context
He was talking about farms, not phones
Read today, the line sounds like a verdict on smartphones. In 1854 it was a verdict on agriculture and real estate. The sentence sits in the middle of Thoreau’s argument that a settled life quietly reverses the relationship between a person and their possessions: “The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer; and he who stood under a tree for shelter, a housekeeper.” The plough and the house are the tools in question.
The passage is the punchline of the long opening chapter, “Economy,” in which Thoreau totals up the cost of his cabin to the half-cent to show how little a life actually requires. His complaint is not that tools are bad but that maintaining them becomes the life — you acquire the farm, then spend your years serving it.
The man who independently plucked the fruits when he was hungry is become a farmer.
How it became a technology quote
The sentence detached from its farming context early. Quote Investigator’s earliest cited example of it circulating on its own is an 1877 article in Ireland’s Dublin University Magazine, “Thoreau: Hermit and Thinker,” which listed it among Thoreau’s “brief pithy aphorisms” alongside “In the long run men hit only what they aim at.” H. L. Mencken’s 1942 A New Dictionary of Quotations then filed it under the heading “Machine” — a category Thoreau never put it in.
It also acquired relatives. Churchill’s 1943 remark to the Commons about rebuilding the bombed chamber — “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us” — and John Culkin’s 1967 “We shape our tools and thereafter they shape us” belong to a separate family of sayings. They rhyme with Thoreau; they do not descend from him.
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Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1817–1862 · American essayist, naturalist & transcendentalist
Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts on 12 July 1817 and died there on 6 May 1862, aged 44. He worked as a teacher, a land surveyor and a hand in his family’s pencil factory, and from 4 July 1845 to 6 September 1847 he lived in a small cabin at Walden Pond on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson — the experiment that became Walden (1854). His other lasting work is the essay Civil Disobedience, whose argument for nonviolent refusal of unjust law travelled far beyond New England.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Henry D. Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), 41–42. Original wording: “But lo! men have become the tools of their tools.”
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Men have become the tools of their tools’?” Last verified 7 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/men-have-become-the-tools-of-their-tools/