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. – Jean Cocteau (1889–1963), translated from French

But he wore a moustache—a shaggy moustache too: nothing in the meek and merciful way, but quite in the fierce and scornful style: the regular Satanic sort of thing—and he wore, besides, a vast quantity of unbrushed hair. – Charles Dickens, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit, 1843

The discovery of a grey hair when you are brushing out your whiskers of a morning—first fallen flake of the coming snows of age—is a disagreeable thing…. – Alexander Smith, “An Essay on an Old Subject”