Unhelpfully contradictory quotes about Truth

Last summer, after just about scraping through a Russian Literature paper, I sent my brilliant but also unusually patient tutor a thank you card. In a bid to say something a bit more meaningful than just: 'thanks for getting me through the Dostoevsky exam, nice one', I wrote, truthfully, thatwhen I chose my degree discipline, theology, I had naively thought that it would provide answers. Half-way through my degree I realised, to my disgust, that it was just throwing up more questions. By the end of my four year course I felt that I had begun to get a vague inkling of how to formulate what the most important questions were. I thanked him for contributing to this process.

I really liked his reply:
Hopefully, Dostoevsky will be a companion to whom you will return at many points in life and, like many good writers, a true friend. As for God - perhaps in my Kierkegaard lecture I mentioned Lessing's saying that, if God held all truth in his right hand and the endless pursuit of it in his left, then he (lessing) would always choose the left. perhaps that's how it has to be. Good luck, anyway, and keep looking.

But I've never really understood that Lessing quote. I would pick the right hand. Why would one want to be willfully ignorant? The full quote:

If God held all truth concealed in his right hand, and in his left hand the persistent striving for the truth... and should say 'Choose!' I should humbly bow before his left hand and say, 'Father give me striving. For pure truth is for thee alone.'

Maybe life would be easier if one believed that last sentence, pure truth is for God alone. Emerson writes:
Every mind must make its choice between truth and repose. It cannot have both.

But that can seem like a cop-out. A bit too Sunday school facile: 'God works in mysterious ways, dear. Now have you drawn the special intersection of the three circles in gold, using the special pen?'

And Lessing also says:
It is not the truth that a man possesses, but the earnest effort which he puts forward to reach the truth, which constitutes the worth of a man.

Isn't that earnest effort a bit pointless if one believes that what one is striving for - truth - is ultimately unobtainable?

One of my favourite teen books - The Giver by Lois Lowry - expands on Lessing's idea that God alone has the burden/glory of full truth. In Lowry's questionably utopian futuristic world, only one individual in each generation is given the burden of memories, the pain of knowledge. I'm not doing the book full justice; it is incredible.