“A faculty for idleness implies a catholic appetite and a strong sense of personal identity.”

Heathcliff (Ch. XXXIII).
Source: Wuthering Heights (1847)
Context: I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when every thing is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me — now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives. I could do it, and none could hinder me; but where is the use? I don't care for striking — I can't take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case. I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.

Cardinal Winning Lecture (February 2, 2008)

Source: The development of intelligence in children, 1916, p. 42-43

The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî (1870), Note I : Hâjî Abdû, The Man
Context: With Hâjî Abdû the soul is not material, for that would be a contradiction of terms. He regards it, with many moderns, as a state of things, not a thing; a convenient word denoting the sense of personality, of individual identity.

" Donald Trump's IQ obsession, in 22 quotes https://edition.cnn.com/2017/10/10/politics/donald-trump-tillerson-iq/index.html" (April 21, 2021)
2013

Source: Memoirs of a Superfluous Man (1943), p. 39
Context: Reading implies a use of the reflective faculty, and very few have that faculty developed much beyond the anthropoid stage, let alone possessing it at a stage of development which makes reading practicable.
As I said, the fact that few literate persons can read is easily determinable by experiment. What first put me on track of it was a remark by one of my old professors. He said that there were people so incompetent, so given to reading with their eyes and their emotions instead of with their brains, that they would accuse the Psalmist of atheism because he had written, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God." The remark stuck by me, and I remember wondering at the time whether the trouble might be that such people hardly had the brains to read with. It seemed possible.

I–II, q. 27, art. 1, 3
Summa Theologica (1265–1274)

Original: (it) Forte personalità, creatività ed estrema bellezza intrigano la mente, seducono l'anima, i sensi e dominano la tua essenza.
Source: prevale.net

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)
Variant: 3054. Idle Fellows are the Devil's Playfellows.