“There is always a period when a man with a beard shaves it off. This period does not last. He returns headlong to his beard.”

Source: Cannery Row

Variant: He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man. He that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.
Source: Much Ado About Nothing

Source: Nature and Selected Essays

That is true. I used to dress up as Jesus. That’s what I first did onstage. I built a cross as well, a fuck-off big cross about as big as that wall, and I used to get on it at the start of a gig. And I’d have this really sad music and eerie lights, and then the music would just go ‘vvvstp’ and turn into Chas ‘N’ Dave, and I’d start dancing [...] And I used to have a water-pistol as well. So if anyone heckled, I’d just squirt ‘em until they were soaked. ‘Don’t Fuck With The Lord’. I used to tell normal jokes, and make no reference to the fact that I was Jesus. I’m over that stage of my life now. I couldn’t grow a beard though so I had to paint one on, and it used to melt under the lights. So by the end of the gig I used to look like a deranged Jesus with brown juice going down his neck. It was a bit frightening for the children.
HermAphroditeZine, Autumn 1999

Mary Garvin, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

Chagall stated this in 1950
as quoted in From Rebel to Rabbi: Reclaiming Jesus and the Making of Modern Jewish Culture, Matthew B. Hoffman; Stanford University Press, 2007, p. 219
after 1930

Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow (1886)