“In one letter, [Einstein] wrote despondently, "I am nothing but a burden to my relatives....It would surely be better if I did not live at all."
He finally managed to get a job as a clerk, third class, at the patent office in Bern. It was humiliating but actually a blessing in disguise. In quiet of the patent office Einstein could return to the old question that had haunted him since he was a child. From there, he would launch a revolution that physics and the world upside down.”