Confucius describes rén (spoken jen) as humanity expressed in cardinal moral values. Rén means complete virtue.

''Fan Chi asked about humaneness. The Master said it is loving people.
Fan Chi asked about wisdom. The Master said it is knowing people."
Analects XII.22

• Everybody makes fun of virtue, which by now has, as its primary meaning, an affectation of prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent. Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Anglo-American Catholic Trappist monk, mystic student of comparative religion, social activist, poet, writer, autobiography The Seven Storey Mountain, Harcourt Brace, 11. October 1948

• [O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters. Benjamin Franklin [The First American, Founding Father] (1706-1705) US American statesman, political theorist, occultist, polymath, diplomat, civic activist, author, letter to the Abbés Chalut and Arnaud, 17. April 1787

• In the future [...]
  ☛ mental exercise will be accepted and practiced in the same way as physical exercise today.
  ☛ We will have a science of virtuous qualities.
  ☛ We will incorporate the mind back into medicine and better understand how the brain can modulate peripheral biology in ways that affect health. This will allow us to take more responsibility for our own health by changing the mind in ways that can impact the brain in healthy directions.
  ☛ We'll be able to develop a secular approach to provide methods and practices from contemplative traditions to
  • teach teachers and children ways to better regulate emotions and attention and cultivate qualities like kindness and compassion.
  • increase awareness of interdependence upon others and upon the planet and be more responsible caretakers
    of the environment and the planet.
  • promote their widespread adoption into the public discourse and major institutions of culture thereby restoring civility, humility, gratitude and other virtues in human life.

• The virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called practical wisdom. Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. [...] [The] stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos [...] need to measure out [...] round columns using a ruler. [...] They created a ruler that bends [...] a tape measure – a flexible rule, a rule that bends. [...] And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules.
  Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. Wise people know how to improvise. […] the rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. [...] And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims.
  If you are a rule-bender and an improvisor mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself.
  And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-fin-
  ding. Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue.

Birch tree in autumn

• Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom. [...] there is no substitute for wisdom. [...]
  You need to have rules. You need to have incentives. [...] the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity [...] in two senses.
  1. First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. [...]
  2. And second, they demoralize the activity itself. The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. It creates people – when you manipu-
     late incentives to get people to do the right thing – it creates people who are addicted to incentives. That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives.

• Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue con-
  sistently. You can practice any virtue erratically, but nothing consistently without courage.
  Maya Angelou (1928-2014) US American historian, actress, producer, director, educator, civil-rights activist, playwright, poet, bestselling black author, cited in: Stedman Graham, Diversity. Leaders Not Labels, S. 224, 2006

• Virtue is its own reward. Saying