영어 속담(English Proverbs)

Never hand an ill workman good tools.(일 못하는 목수가 연장을 나무란다.)

An ill labourer quarrels with his tools.(일 못하는 목수가 연장을 나무란다.) 

• The Works of George Herbert in Prose and Verse; 1881, New York: John Wurtele Lovell, Pub.; pp. 440 & 454.

Compare the older French proverb:

• Outil: … Meſchant ouvrier ne trouvera ia bons outils: Prov. A bungler cannot find (or fit himself with) with good tools.
  • Randle Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611)

Galen explains clearly, if less succinctly, in De Causis Procatarcticis (2nd c. A.D.), VI. 63–65:

• They blame their tools: why did the carpenter make the bed so badly, if he was any good? He will reply: "Because I used a poor axe and a thick gimlet, because I did not have a rule, I lost my hammer, and the hatchet was blunt", and other things of this kind. And the scribe, asked why he wrote so badly, will say that the paper was rough, the ink too fluid, the pen blunt, that he did not have a smoother, so that he could not write any better. once again, this man holds his material responsible, and blames his tools as well, in mentioning the pen and smoother. And who does not know that artisans make themselves responsible for the deficiencies in their work too, when they cannot pin the blame on material and tools?
  • Galen on Antecedent Causes, Tr. R. J. Hankinson, Cambridge University Press, 1998, ISBN 0521622506, p. 90–93.