I have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight.

From exertion come wisdom and purity; from sloth ignorance and sensuality.

Instead of improving these gifts, rarely granted so abundantly, this has been your course you have given yourself up to sloth and drunkenness, and in a fit of intoxication have ruined your best friend.''

In the political body, however, the wisdom of nature has fortunately made ample provision for remedying many of the bad effects of the folly and injustice of man; it the same manner as it has done in the natural body, for remedying those of his sloth and intemperance.

Toys and fooleries at home, wars abroad: sometimes terror, sometimes torpor, or stupid sloth: this is thy daily slavery.

But now sloth triumphs over energy, indolence over exertion, vice over virtue, arrogance over courage, and theory over practice in arms, which flourished and shone only in the golden ages and in knights-errant.

We have to slay pride in giants, envy by generosity and nobleness of heart, anger by calmness of demeanour and equanimity, gluttony and sloth by the spareness of our diet and the length of our vigils, lust and lewdness by the loyalty we preserve to those whom we have made the mistresses of our thoughts, indolence by traversing the world in all directions seeking opportunities of making ourselves, besides Christians, famous knights.

All I shall do is to pray to heaven to deliver you from it, and show you how beneficial and necessary knights-errant were in days of yore, and how useful they would be in these days were they but in vogue; but now, for the sins of the people, sloth and indolence, gluttony and luxury are triumphant."

There were other signs of removal about, with queer narrow footprints like those I could imagine made by a sloth.

By all which, instead of being discouraged, they are fifty times more violently bent upon prosecuting their schemes, driven equally on by hope and despair: that as for himself, being not of an enterprising spirit, he was content to go on in the old forms, to live in the houses his ancestors had built, and act as they did, in every part of life, without innovation: that some few other persons of quality and gentry had done the same, but were looked on with an eye of contempt and ill-will, as enemies to art, ignorant, and ill common-wealth’s men, preferring their own ease and sloth before the general improvement of their country.” His lordship added, “That he would not, by any further particulars, prevent the pleasure I should certainly take in viewing the grand academy, whither he was resolved I should go.” He only desired me to observe a ruined building, upon the side of a mountain about three miles distant, of which he gave me this account: “That he had a very convenient mill within half a mile of his house, turned by a current from a large river, and sufficient for his own family, as well as a great number of his tenants; that about seven years ago, a club of those projectors came to him with proposals to destroy this mill, and build another on the side of that mountain, on the long ridge whereof a long canal must be cut, for a repository of water, to be conveyed up by pipes and engines to supply the mill, because the wind and air upon a height agitated the water, and thereby made it fitter for motion, and because the water, descending down a declivity, would turn the mill with half the current of a river whose course is more upon a level.” He said, “that being then not very well with the court, and pressed by many of his friends, he complied with the proposal; and after employing a hundred men for two years, the work miscarried, the projectors went off, laying the blame entirely upon him, railing at him ever since, and putting others upon the same experiment, with equal assurance of success, as well as equal disappointment.” In a few days we came back to town; and his excellency, considering the bad character he had in the academy, would not go with me himself, but recommended me to a friend of his, to bear me company thither.

“He could easily conceive, that a _Houyhnhnm_, grew weak and heavy a few days before his death, or by some accident might hurt a limb; but that nature, who works all things to perfection, should suffer any pains to breed in our bodies, he thought impossible, and desired to know the reason of so unaccountable an evil.” I told him “we fed on a thousand things which operated contrary to each other; that we ate when we were not hungry, and drank without the provocation of thirst; that we sat whole nights drinking strong liquors, without eating a bit, which disposed us to sloth, inflamed our bodies, and precipitated or prevented digestion; that prostitute female _Yahoos_ acquired a certain malady, which bred rottenness in the bones of those who fell into their embraces; that this, and many other diseases, were propagated from father to son; so that great numbers came into the world with complicated maladies upon them; that it would be endless to give him a catalogue of all diseases incident to human bodies, for they would not be fewer than five or six hundred, spread over every limb and joint—in short, every part, external and intestine, having diseases appropriated to itself.

One of his findings was the Milodon Cave at the base of the Cerro Benitez, where he recovered remains of the extinct Giant sloth and evidence of habitation of early man from 10,000 BC.

In Binsfeld's classification of demons, each one of these princes represents one of the seven deadly sins (Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Wrath, Envy, and Pride).

Mionothropus is an extinct genus of nothrotheriine nothrotheriid sloth which existed in Peru in western Amazonia, during the late Miocene (Huayquerian age).

The Nogeyama zoo was the first zoo in Japan to successfully house leopards (1852), blackbuck (1953), dromedary (1954), sloth bear (1965), ring-tailed lemur (1969), pileated gibbon and caracal (1974), clouded leopard (1983), giant anteater (1985), Kleinmann's Tortoise (1992), Asian forest tortoise (1997), and radiated tortoise (2009).

During his playing career Sabella's nicknames were "el Mago" ("the Magician") and "Pachorra" ("Sloth"), because of his perceived slowness during play.

Not far from its mouth to the northwest lies the Cueva del Milodon Natural Monument, where remains of the extinct Giant sloth were discovered along with evidence of habitation by early man c. 10,000 BC.

Sri Lankan Sloth Bear, Sri Lankan Leopard, Sri Lankan Elephant, Wild water buffalo are threatened species that Yala is harbouring.

Wildlife lovers can have a chance to watch tiger, leopard, elephant, gaur, sambar, spotted deer, mouse deer, nilagai, four-horned antelope and sloth bear.

The Sigur river valley acts as a crucial micro-habitat for herbivores, especially elephants, gaur and sambar and carnivores such as tiger, leopard, wild dog (dhole), sloth bear and striped hyaena for feeding, resting and denning.

Poinar first became known for extracting DNA sequences from ground sloth coprolites.

In a joint 2000 paper in "Science", Poinar and Dr. Alan Cooper argued that much existing work in human ancient DNA has not been sufficiently rigorous to prevent DNA contamination from modern human sources, and that many reported results for ancient human DNA may therefore be suspect. In 2003, Poinar and others from the Max Planck Institute published genetic sequences isolated from coprolites of the extinct Shasta giant ground sloth, with an estimated age of 10500 years using radiocarbon dates.

This were the first genetic sequences retrieved from any extinct ground sloth.