Never say about any thing, I have lost it, but say I have restored it. Is your child dead? It has been restored. Is your wife dead? She has been restored. Has your estate been taken from you? Has not then this also been restored? But he who has taken it from me is a bad man. But what is it to you, by whose hands the giver demanded it back? So long as he may allow you, take care of it as a thing which belongs to another, as travellers do with their inn.
The image of the inn is the entire teaching. You did not build the inn. You did not own the room. You were a guest in it. Treat it well while you are there; expect the day when the steward asks you to leave. The grief over what was returned is not for the thing itself — it is for the illusion that we owned it. Everything belongs to the class of adiaphora, an external, on loan. The Stoic does not deny the loss; he refuses the misclassification that turns custody into possession.
Epictetus, Enchiridion 11 · trans. George Long (1877)
Context
One of the most quoted Stoic passages and one of the easiest to misuse. The reframe is severe — bordering, in modern ears, on cold. Epictetus's view is that everything we have was loaned, and clarity about this fact is what makes grief survivable rather than what makes us monstrous.