This is the real thing: Enchiridion 11, the pocket handbook that Epictetus’s student Arrian compiled from his teaching around 125 AD. The familiar English wording goes back to Elizabeth Carter’s translation (published 1758; the Dublin edition of 1759 reads “Never say of any thing, ‘I have lost it;’ but, ‘I have restored it’”) and is reproduced word for word in Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s translation.
“Never say of anything, I have lost it; but, I have restored it” Never say of anything, "I have lost it," but, "I have restored it." — Epictetus, Enchiridion 11 (compiled by Arrian, c. 125 AD), trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson; the same wording appears in Elizabeth Carter's 1758 translation. Verified via Quotle.info
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Provenance
The passage in full
Work
The Enchiridion (Encheiridion), chapter XI
Compiled
by Arrian, c. 125 AD, from Epictetus’s Discourses
Translation
Thomas Wentworth Higginson; identical wording in Elizabeth Carter’s translation, 1758 (Dublin ed. 1759)
Never say of anything, “I have lost it,” but, “I have restored it.” Has your child died? It is restored. Has your wife died? She is restored. Has your estate been taken away? That likewise is restored. “But it was a bad man who took it.” What is it to you by whose hands he who gave it has demanded it again? While he permits you to possess it, hold it as something not your own, as do travelers at an inn.
Enchiridion XI
Higginson’s translation of chapter XI, complete. Carter’s 1759 text opens identically: “Never say of any thing, ‘I have lost it;’ but, ‘I have restored it.’”
The earliest familiar English is Elizabeth Carter’s. Her Encheiridion, section XI, reads “Never say of any thing, ‘I have lost it;’ but, ‘I have restored it.’” Wikisource, Carter 1759 ↗
Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s translation carries the same sentence and the full surrounding passage, read verbatim in the free public-domain text. Project Gutenberg ebook 45109 ↗
The handbook itself is a compilation: Arrian assembled it from Epictetus’s Discourses around 125 CE. Enchiridion of Epictetus ↗
Wording varies with the translator — the Internet Classics Archive’s modernised Carter text gives “I have returned it” in the same place. Internet Classics Archive ↗
✓Public domain
Epictetus’s Greek is ancient and long out of copyright, and so is the English that carries this line. Elizabeth Carter’s translation was published in 1758, and Project Gutenberg distributes Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s translation as public domain in the USA ↗ — both comfortably clear of the 1931 US cutoff. A modern copyrighted translation would be a different matter; the wording quoted here is not one.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
What usually goes wrong with this one
The attribution is sound, but three things routinely get lost between the Enchiridion and the graphic on your feed.
✕
authorship“Epictetus wrote…” Compiled, not written
He wrote nothing. The Enchiridion is a digest his student Arrian assembled from the Discourses around 125 CE, which is why the line is best described as taught rather than penned. Wikipedia ↗
~
wording“…but, I have returned it” Translation variant
“Restored” is Carter’s and Higginson’s word. The modernised Carter text at the Internet Classics Archive reads “I have returned it” instead, and other translations use “given back” — all rendering the same Greek. Internet Classics Archive ↗
Almost every reposting stops at the first sentence. In Higginson’s text the next two are “Has your child died? It is restored. Has your wife died? She is restored.” — a far harder passage than the excerpt suggests. Project Gutenberg ↗
✓The line is genuinely Epictetus, from Enchiridion 11, and the English everyone quotes is Elizabeth Carter’s eighteenth-century phrasing preserved intact. Carter’s Encheiridion, section XI ↗
Context
Why it mattered
Stoic training was practical, and this is one of its sharpest exercises: a deliberate swap of one verb for another. Lost implies ownership and theft; restored implies you were holding something that was always on loan. Epictetus is not consoling anyone here so much as drilling them — the handbook was meant to be memorised and used in the moment, the way an athlete uses a warm-up.
Read alone, the line sounds like gentle self-help. Read in place, it is anything but. The very next sentences are “Has your child died? It is restored. Has your wife died? She is restored.” That is the register Epictetus was actually writing in, and it is why the passage has stayed in circulation for nineteen centuries while softer consolations have not.
Hold it as something not your own, as do travelers at an inn.
How a handbook by a man who wrote nothing survived
Epictetus left no writings. His pupil Arrian took down his teaching and later assembled the Enchiridion — literally a “handbook,” something small enough to keep close — selecting the material he judged most useful and most likely to move a reader, according to Wikipedia’s account of its compilation ↗.
Because the text reaches English only through translators, the wording of any given line is a translator’s choice. Carter’s 1758 rendering fixed “restored” in the English-speaking imagination, and Higginson kept it — which is why the sentence people quote today matches an eighteenth-century Englishwoman’s phrasing rather than a literal word-for-word Greek equivalent.
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c. 50 – c. 135 AD · Greek Stoic philosopher · taught at Nicopolis
Epictetus was born into slavery at Hierapolis in Phrygia around AD 50, the property of Epaphroditus, a wealthy freedman who served as secretary to Nero. His master let him study Stoic philosophy under Musonius Rufus; freed after Nero’s death, he taught in Rome until Domitian banished philosophers from the city around AD 93, then founded a school at Nicopolis in Greece. He published nothing — everything we have comes through his student Arrian, who recorded the Discourses and distilled the Enchiridion from them, and whose handbook went on to shape Marcus Aurelius and, much later, the Enlightenment.
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Cite this
Chicago
Epictetus, The Enchiridion, chap. 11, trans. Thomas Wentworth Higginson (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1948; Project Gutenberg ebook no. 45109). The identical wording appears in Elizabeth Carter, trans., All the Works of Epictetus, Which Are Now Extant (Dublin, 1759), “The Encheiridion,” sec. 11.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Never say of anything, I have lost it; but, I have restored it’?” Last verified 6 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/never-say-of-anything-i-have-lost-it-but-i-have-restored-it/