The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something

Arthur Schopenhauer, the philosopher of will and suffering, declared with sharp clarity: “The difficulty is to try and teach the multitude that something can be true and untrue at the same time.” In these words lies not a riddle, but a mirror to reality itself. For truth is not always clothed in simplicity; it often wears two garments at once, dazzling and deceiving, blessing and cursing, shining and shadowing together. To the wise, this is evident. To the multitude, it is a stumbling stone, for the common heart yearns for certainty, while life itself is woven of paradox.

To grasp that a thing may be both true and untrue is to open the door to higher understanding. Consider the flame: it gives warmth and light, yet it also devours and destroys. Is fire good or evil? The answer is not one, but both. So it is with wealth, with power, with knowledge—each bears a dual nature, carrying life in one hand and ruin in the other. Schopenhauer’s lament was not against the paradox, but against the stubbornness of people who refuse to see it, who demand that all things be either wholly pure or wholly corrupt.

History teaches us this lesson again and again. Think of Galileo Galilei, who proclaimed that the Earth moves around the Sun. To the multitude, his claim was heresy, for it appeared both true and untrue: true in the realm of the heavens, untrue in the doctrine of the Church. The people clung to the comfort of a single truth, yet in reality, both worlds existed side by side—the old truth that gave meaning, and the new truth that shattered and remade it. Galileo bore the punishment of blindness, yet his paradox bore fruit for generations to come.

Or ponder the tale of Oppenheimer, who harnessed the atom’s secret. His work was true in the brilliance of science, and untrue in the promise of peace, for from his hands came both enlightenment and annihilation. He himself quoted the ancient Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” In him, truth and untruth coiled together like serpents, and the world could not separate them. Here is the eternal struggle: humanity desires answers that are clean, but the world speaks in contradictions.

The lesson for us is this: do not fear paradox, but learn to walk within it. Life will often confront you with choices and realities that are not one-sided. A friend may wound you and yet love you. A defeat may humble you yet sow the seed of victory. A silence may be both cruelty and mercy. To see only one face of reality is blindness; to see both and still act with wisdom is the mark of maturity.

In practice, train your mind to hold contradictions without breaking. When you are wronged, acknowledge both the pain and the growth it brings. When you succeed, see both the glory and the responsibility it carries. Read widely, listen deeply, and cultivate patience with complexity, for the multitude rushes to judgment, but the wise pause in reflection. Do not demand simple answers from a world that was never simple.

Thus, children of tomorrow, heed the cry of Schopenhauer: truth is two-edged, both true and untrue at once. The difficulty is not in the paradox itself, but in our refusal to embrace it. If you would be strong, hold in your heart the flame of duality without being consumed. Let paradox be your teacher, for in it lies the true nature of existence—mystery and clarity, shadow and light, despair and hope, entwined forever in the fabric of life.