“Poets are all who love, who feel great truths,
And tell them; and the truth of truths is love.”
Scene XVI, The Hesperian Sphere
Festus (1839)
“To know the Truth, to love the Truth, and to live the Truth is the whole duty of man.”
Sermon (1899)
“The truth comes to me. The truth loves me.”
Book IV, Ch. 19 : Of Enthusiasm (Chapter added in the fourth edition).
Variant paraphrase, sometimes cited as a direct quote: One unerring mark of the love of truth is not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant.
As paraphrased in Peter's Quotations : Ideas for our Time (1979) by Laurence J. Peter, p. 500; also in The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1994) by Carl Sagan, p. 64
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
Context: He that would seriously set upon the search of truth, ought in the first place to prepare his mind with a love of it. For he that loves it not, will not take much pains to get it; nor be much concerned when he misses it. There is nobody in the commonwealth of learning who does not profess himself a lover of truth: and there is not a rational creature that would not take it amiss to be thought otherwise of. And yet, for all this, one may truly say, that there are very few lovers of truth, for truth's sake, even amongst those who persuade themselves that they are so. How a man may know whether he be so in earnest, is worth inquiry: and I think there is one unerring mark of it, viz. The not entertaining any proposition with greater assurance than the proofs it is built upon will warrant. Whoever goes beyond this measure of assent, it is plain receives not the truth in the love of it; loves not truth for truth's sake, but for some other bye-end.
Statement written weeks before his death in 1994, as quoted in "Unseen Bill Hicks Clip" in Esquire (3 February 2014) https://www.esquire.com/uk/culture/film/news/a5661/unseen-bill-hicks-clip/
Vol. IV, p. 172
Posthumous publications, The Collected Works
Context: Questioner: Can one love truth without loving man? Can one love man without loving truth? What comes first?
Krishnamurti: Love comes first. To love truth, you must know truth. To know truth is to deny truth. What is known is not truth. What is known is already encased in time and ceases to be truth. Truth is an eternal movement, and so cannot be measured in words or in time. It cannot be held in the fist. You cannot love something which you do not know. But truth is not to be found in books, in images, in temples. It is to be found in action, in living. The very search for the unknown is love itself, and you cannot search for the unknowable away from relationship. You cannot search for reality, or for what you will, in isolation. It comes into being only in relationship, only when there is right relationship between man and man. So the love of man is the search for reality.
"Packard Goose"
"Joe's Garage Acts II & III" (1979)
Variant: Information is not knowledge. Knowledge is not wisdom. Wisdom is not truth. Truth is not beauty. Beauty is not love. Love is not music. Music is the best.
