No iron chain, or outward force of any kind, can ever compel the soul of a person to believe or to disbelieve.
Thomas Carlyle

Nothing seems at first sight less important than the outward form of human actions, yet there is nothing upon which men set more store: they grow used to everything except to living in a society which has not their own manners.
Alexis de Tocqueville

O' What may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side!
William Shakespeare

Others indeed may talk, and write, and fight about liberty, and make an outward pretence to it; but the free-thinker alone is truly free.
George Berkeley

Outward failure may be a manifested variant of inward success.
Kenneth L. Pike

Outward judgment often fails, inward judgment never.
Theodore Parker

People live with the illusion that we have a democratic system, but it's only the outward form of one. In reality we live in a plutocracy, a government of the rich.
Jose Saramago

Sanctification is not to be understood here as a separation from ordinary use or consecration to some special use, although this meaning is often present in Scripture, sometimes referring to outward and sometimes to inward or effectual separation.
William Ames

Tear man out of his outward circumstances; and what he then is; that only is he.
Johann G. Seume

The ability to convert ideas to things is the secret of outward success.
Henry Ward Beecher

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle

The evidence points to central Asia as man's original home, for the general movement of human migrations has been outward from that region and not inward.
Ellsworth Huntington

The habit of being happy enables one to be freed, or largely freed, from the domination of outward conditions.
Robert Louis Stevenson

The inward area is the first place of loss of true Christian life, of true spirituality, and the outward sinful act is the result.
Francis Schaeffer

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.
Meister Eckhart

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.
Meister Eckhart

There are two sorts of hypocrites: ones that are deceived with their outward morality and external religion; and the others are those that are deceived with false discoveries and elevation; which often cry down works, and men's own righteousness, and.
Jonathan Edwards

There is a courtesy of the heart; it is allied to love. From its springs the purest courtesy in the outward behavior.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.
Robert Louis Stevenson

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.
James H. Breasted