No man can lose what he never had.

The aphorism turns on a simple logical point—loss presupposes prior possession—and is often used to cool envy, disappointment, or fear of deprivation. In moral or religious contexts it can suggest that what truly matters is not external goods (which may never have been rightly “ours”) but inner virtues or spiritual gifts. It can also function as a rebuke to imagined grievances: one cannot claim to be wronged by being deprived of something one did not in fact possess. At the same time, the saying can be read critically as minimizing forms of loss that are experiential or aspirational (e.g., the loss of hopes or opportunities), even when no concrete possession existed.