Confucius

Between the maxims, the Analects lets the Master describe himself — and the self-portrait is humbler than his reputation. A man who claimed to transmit rather than invent, who forgot to eat when a problem gripped him, who was happy with coarse rice and a bent arm for a pillow, and who measured his life in decades of slowly getting it right.

Ren — goodness, humaneness, the one virtue the whole book circles. Confucius would never quite define it, but he kept showing what it looks like: to love people; to want for others what you want for yourself; and the line the whole world now knows — do not do to others what you would not want done to you.