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

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

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

The views of space and time which I wish to lay before you have sprung from the soil of experimental physics, and therein lies their strength. They are radical. Henceforth, space by itself, and time by itself, are doomed to fade away into mere shadows, and only a kind of union of the two will preserve an independent reality.