The preceding collection of stories about Einstein the young boy demonstrates the remarkable extent to which his most characteristic personal traits … - Abraham Pais

To make a discovery is not necessarily the same as to understand a discovery. Not only Planck but also other physicists were initially at a loss as to what the proper context of the new postulate really was.

Once I even took the train to Utrecht, forty miles from Amsterdam, with my yellow star, this star which I still have. Why did I go? I just wanted to visit some friends. I was a little bit crazy, a little bit insane

All modern work on unification may be said to represent a program of geometrization that resembles Einstein's earlier attempts, although the manifold subject to geometrization is larger than he anticipated and the quantum framework of the program would not have been to his liking.