Life without laughing is a dreary blank. [ Thackeray ]

A smooth or blank tablet; a blank surface.

No blank, no trifle, Nature made or meant. [ Young ]

I will this dreary blank of absence make,
A noble task-time, and will therein strive
To follow excellence, and to overtake
More good than I have won since yet I live. [ Francis Kemble ]

Every day a little life, a blank to be inscribed with gentle thoughts. [ Rogers ]

God is a blank tablet on which nothing further is inscribed than what thou hast thyself written thereupon. [ Luther ]

A thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept their pale, unbodied shade, to warn us from fleshless hps. [ Bulwer ]

Error is always more busy than ignorance. Ignorance is a blank sheet on which we may write; but error is a scribbled one from which we must first erase. [ Colton ]

The past but lives in words; a thousand ages were blank if books had not evoked their ghosts, and kept the pale, unbodied shades to warn us from fleshless lips. [ Edward Bulwer-Lytton ]

The loss of a mother is always severely felt; even though Her health may incapacitate her from taking any active part in the care of her family, still she is a sweet rallying-point, around which affection and obedience, and a thousand tender endeavors to please concentrate; and dreary is the blank when such a point is withdrawn! It is like that lonely star before us; neither its heat nor light are anything to us in themselves; yet the shepherd would feel his heart sad if he missed it, when he lifts his eye to the brow of the mountain over which it rises when the sun descends. [ Lamartine ]

My method has been simply this - to think well on the subject which I had to deal with and when thoroughly impressed with it and acquainted with it in all its details, to write away without stopping to choose a word, leaving a blank where I was at a loss for it; to express myself as simply as possible in vernacular English, and afterwards to go through what I had written, striking out all redundancies, and substituting, when possible, simpler and more English words for those I might have written. I found that by following this method I could generally reduce very considerably in length what I had put on paper without sacrificing anything of importance or rendering myself less intelligible. [ Sir Austen Henry Layard, The Art of Authorship, 1891 ]