'Tis the Truth! The only Truth!
I should sleep. I'm going on something less than 5 hours, which isn't good.
I won't pretend to remember what sparked this train of thought, since I'm too tired to. But I got on this idea of truth, and knowledge, and whatever not. To address it: true knowledge aka truth is impossible, beyond self-awareness and abstract logical or mathematical propositions. It is impossible to find this ‘truth’, but we still go looking and find vagaries of perception. Yet it's built into our little human minds to seek the truth. It's what we spend our whole lives doing, whether that truth is God or love or whatever else. It takes different names, but it's the same thing we're looking for. Everyone looks for the truth, whether they know it or not. And no one ever finds it. We humans are funny creatures - we spend our lives looking and looking for things we're not going to find.
Of course, we have the counterargument that proposes we don't naturally seek truth; we seek safety and satisfaction and comfort. Religion, science, etc. are all means towards a certain end: truth. Religion, mysticism, etc. are the worst suited to their task, but they provide the most comforting answers - hence humanity's fascination with them.
Truth is rarely comfortable or soothing. If your first motivation is the answers that leave you feeling safe and important, then you aren't cut out to seriously seek them.
I was looking for a book to read today, picked up American Gods (again) out of a pile of books that I've already read before. So I flipped through it, and this line stuck with me:
Neither path is safe. Which way would you walk - the way of hard truths or the way of fine lies?
So, which would you pick? Plenty of people would say the former; I think most of us would go to the latter, when offered the choice.