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You have heard it in a meeting, in a podcast, or from someone trying to end an argument: the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. And you have almost certainly heard Albert Einstein’s name attached to it.
There is no substantive evidence that Einstein ever said or wrote it. Researchers who have gone looking cannot find it anywhere in his work, and Princeton University Press’s own reference collection, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, files it in the section headed “Misattributed to Einstein.”
The earliest printed version anyone has produced is from 1981 – twenty-six years after Einstein died – and it comes from a room nobody expects.
(You will also see it as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, or repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results. Same saying, same trail.)
Where the definition of insanity quote actually came from
The most careful work on this has been done by Garson O’Toole, the quotation researcher behind Quote Investigator, who spends his time chasing famous lines back to their first appearance in print.
The oldest instance he has been able to find is from October 1981, in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, a newspaper in Tennessee. A reporter had sat in on a meeting of Al-Anon – the twelve-step group not for people who drink, but for the families and friends of people who do.
The article was about the Twelve Steps, and particularly the first two. Step Two reads: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” One person in the room said they did not care for that phrase, “restored to sanity.” And another person in the room answered with a line:
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
That is the oldest version anyone has produced. Not a lecture hall. A meeting room in Tennessee, in a conversation about whether the word “sanity” belonged in the step at all.
A month later, in November 1981, the saying shows up in print again, in material put out by Narcotics Anonymous, in a slightly different shape: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.”
Two years after that it reached a much wider audience through fiction. Rita Mae Brown’s 1983 novel Sudden Death gives the line to a character named Jane Fulton, and a newspaper review that summer quoted it back out of the book. A great many people met the sentence there.
And Einstein? The earliest attribution to him that has been located is from 1990 – thirty-five years after his death. Travis County District Attorney Ronnie Earle was quoted in the Austin American-Statesman saying, “Einstein once said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”
So the saying travelled for most of a decade with nobody’s name on it. Then a name got attached, and the name is what carried it around the world.
Which is worth sitting with for a moment, because nobody did anything wrong here. People repeat what they hear. A line that sounds clever gets a clever person’s name, the name makes it sound truer, and the truer it sounds the further it goes. Almost all of us have passed this one along at some point, including us.
It is not actually a definition of insanity
Here is the second thing about the saying, and it is not a technicality.
“Insanity” is not a medical word. It is not a diagnosis in the manual doctors and therapists use, and no clinician will ever write it on a chart, because there is no such condition to write. It is a legal term. It belongs almost entirely to a courtroom, where it describes one narrow question: was a person so affected by a mental condition at the time of a crime that they should not be held responsible for it?
So the sentence is not defining anything. It is a vivid observation about human behaviour wearing the costume of a clinical fact.
There is a quiet joke buried in that, given that the first person on record putting Einstein’s name to it was a district attorney – a man who used the word “insanity” professionally, in the one setting where it means something specific.
None of which makes the saying useless. It is a sharp observation, and it has helped a great many people see a loop they were standing inside. It simply is not a definition, and it does not become one by having a physicist’s name on the front.
The part that changes the sentence completely
Go back to that room in Knoxville for a second.
Nobody there was diagnosing anybody. They were working through Step Two, which is a statement a person makes about their own life. Whoever said that line was talking about themselves – about their own repeating, their own hoping, their own results.
Now think about how the sentence gets used today.
It gets said about a colleague who will not change. About a government. About a boss, a coach, an ex, a relative who keeps going back to the same person. It has become a line you deploy at somebody, usually while they are not in the room.
Same words. Opposite direction.
A sentence that began as a confession has turned into a polite way of telling other people they are foolish. That is a long way to travel, and it is a bigger drift than the wrong name on the front of it.
Why the difference is worth knowing
Consider what the sentence becomes depending on whose mouth it is in.
If it is Einstein’s, it is a verdict handed down by the most famous mind of the last century. It sorts people into two groups: those who learn, and those who keep walking into the same wall. It is a sentence that looks down.
If it came from an unnamed person in a twelve-step room, it is something else entirely. It is what somebody says out loud after finally admitting they cannot stop on their own – that they have tried, and tried the same way, and it has not worked, and they are done pretending otherwise. Said in that room, on that day, it is not contempt. It is the opposite of contempt. It is the sound of someone giving up on their own strategy.
That confession is a great deal older than 1981. A man writing a letter to a church in Rome, sometime in the first century, put it this way:
“For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” – Romans 7:15
He is not describing anybody else. He is describing himself, in the first person, four times over in one sentence. He keeps doing the thing he does not want to do, he cannot account for it, and he says so plainly in a letter he knows will be read aloud to a room full of people who know him.
Nineteen centuries before anyone thought to credit Einstein, the shape of the saying is already there. Not a diagnosis you hand to somebody else. An admission you make about yourself – usually right before you ask for help.
What to do with the line now
Keep it, if it is useful to you. It often is.
Just know where it came from. Not a laboratory, and not the mind of a genius. A plain room where ordinary people were being honest about a loop they could not get out of alone.
And notice which way it was pointing when they said it. Most of us have been using it the other way round. That is an easy thing to change, and it costs nothing.
If this sort of thing interests you, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” has a similar story – everyone is sure who said it, and the trail does not lead there. So does “you don’t have a soul, you are a soul”. And if it was the idea of a mind that genuinely changes direction that caught you here, the Greek word for exactly that – metanoia – literally means a change of mind, and is far less about grovelling than it sounds.
A question worth sitting with
Which quotation changed on you once you found out where it really came from? And which sayings have you always assumed were in the Bible – or always assumed came from someone famous? Half the lines we live by turn out to have started somewhere much smaller and much more human. Tell us which one surprised you most.
Share this
- I had no idea: “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is not Einstein. The oldest known printing is from a 1981 Al-Anon meeting, and the person saying it was talking about themselves.
- The “definition of insanity” line was never a definition. Insanity is a legal word, not a medical one – no doctor can diagnose it. And the first person on record crediting it to Einstein, in 1990, was a district attorney.
- It started as a confession in a recovery meeting. We turned it into a way of telling other people they are foolish. Same words, opposite direction.
Questions people are asking
Did Albert Einstein say “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”?
There is no substantive evidence that Albert Einstein said or wrote “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Researchers have not found it in his writings, letters, lectures or interviews, and The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, the reference collection published by Princeton University Press, lists it in its section of quotations misattributed to him. Einstein died in 1955. The oldest known printing of the saying dates to October 1981, twenty-six years later, and the earliest instance anyone has found of the line being credited to Einstein is from 1990 – thirty-five years after his death. Strictly speaking, no one can prove a person never said something in private. But on everything that has actually been checked, this one is not his.
Who really said the definition of insanity quote?
Nobody knows the name, and that is part of the answer. The oldest known printing of “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” appeared in October 1981 in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, in a news article about a meeting of Al-Anon, the twelve-step group for the families and friends of alcoholics. An unnamed person at that meeting said it. A month later, in November 1981, a close variant appeared in material printed by Narcotics Anonymous: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” Anonymity is the whole point in those communities, so no individual author has ever been identified. The saying appears to have grown up inside twelve-step recovery, spoken by people about themselves.
Did Rita Mae Brown write the definition of insanity quote?
Rita Mae Brown put the line in print in her 1983 novel Sudden Death, where a character named Jane Fulton says, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results.” Her novel is often named as the source, and it is genuinely where many readers first met the sentence. But it is not the origin. Two documented instances predate it by roughly two years, both from twelve-step settings in 1981. The most accurate way to put it is that Rita Mae Brown popularised the saying in print rather than invented it.
Is “the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over” a real medical definition?
No. “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result” is not a medical or psychiatric definition of anything. Insanity is not a clinical diagnosis at all – it does not appear in the diagnostic manual clinicians use, and no doctor or therapist diagnoses a person as insane. It is a legal term, used almost entirely in courtrooms, where it addresses one specific question: whether a person’s mental condition at the time of a crime means they should not be held criminally responsible for it. The saying is a memorable observation about repeated behaviour, not a definition, and it was never meant to be one.
Is “insanity is doing the same thing over and over” in the Bible?
No. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results” is not in the Bible and does not appear in any translation of it – the saying dates to 1981. The nearest thing in scripture runs in a very different direction, because it is spoken about the writer himself rather than about anyone else. Romans 7:15 reads: “For that which I do I allow not: for what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I.” That is a man describing his own repeated behaviour, admitting he cannot explain it and cannot stop it on his own – which is much closer to how the modern saying was originally used than to how it usually gets used now.
