The invention discloses a brittle material crack initiation stress measurement system and a brittle material crack initiation stress measurement method. The brittle material crack initiation stress measurement system comprises a loading device, a CCD camera, a synchronizer trigger, a load-time signal receiving device and a digital image signal receiving device. The brittle material crack initiation stress measurement method includes synchronously triggering the loading device and the CCD camera by the synchronizer trigger, loading a sample and outputting a load-time signal; shooting sample surface images by the CCD camera in real time; not stopping shooting until the sample is destroyed; selecting a first frame of images shot by the CCD camera, marking 2 measurement points on the circumference of a through hole, continuously measuring tensile strain-time curves of the 2 measurement points in a whole loading process, and determining stress values, namely crack initiation stress sigmaci,on the stress-time curves corresponding to tensile crack initiation time T. The brittle material crack initiation stress measurement system and the brittle material crack initiation stress measurement method have the advantages that the position and the expansion direction of brittle material crack initiation can be controlled, the crack initiation time and the crack initiation stress can be determined objectively, precisely and quantitatively, authenticity and reliability of brittle material crack initiation stress measurement are improved effectively, and the method simple to operate, reliable in result and objective in quantization is provided for measuring crack initiation stress of rock-like brittle materials with prefabricated holes under uniaxial compression.