“Your object is to see yourself exactly as you are. Self-knowledge is the discovery of the new: it looks beyond the world that has all the answers and no solutions.”

Changing the World

Abide as the Self

Stillness Speaks (2003)

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

The Temple of the Golden Pavilion (1959).
Context: What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed. You may ask what good it does us. Let's put it this way — human beings possess the weapon of knowledge in order to make life bearable. For animals such things aren't necessary. Animals don't need knowledge or anything of the sort to make life bearable. But human beings do need something, and with knowledge they can make the very intolerableness of life a weapon, though at the same time that intolerableness is not reduced in the slightest. That's all there is to it.

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

Source: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), Ch. 7
Context: When you look directly at an insane man all you see is a reflection of your own knowledge that he's insane, which is not to see him at all. To see him you must see what he saw and when you are trying to see the vision of an insane man, an oblique route is the only way to come at it.

Knowing Yourself: The True in the False (1996)

“Technologies of the Self,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth (1994), p. 228