[Zurich,] where the students, even the most capable among them, ... are accustomed to get everything spoon-fed. - Hermann Minkowski

The whole world appears resolved into such world-lines. And I should like to say beforehand that, according to my opinion, it would be possible for the physical laws to find their fullest expression as correlations of these world-lines.

It came as a tremendous surprise, for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy dog... He never bothered about mathematics at all.

The rigid electron is in my view a monster in relation to Maxwell's equations, whose innermost harmony is the principle of relativity.