To love God means to love the highest good that we can imagine.
People often say: I do not understand the love for God. It would be more accurate to say: I do not understand any love without the love for God.
The true love of God is a moral sentiment, founded on a clear perception, and consisting in a high esteem and veneration, of his moral perfections. Thus, it perfectly coincides, and is in fact the same thing, with the love of virtue, rectitude, and goodness.
— Channing
The one who has fully mastered the knowledge of the law but is alien to the love for God is like a treasurer who has been handed the inner keys without the outer.
— The Talmud
God’s commandments should be fulfilled out of love for God, not out of fear of him.
— The Talmud
The way that a person feels himself in his heart is, in essence, what his God is like: he is either kind, loving and just, or he is vindictive, angry and malevolent.
— Lucy Mallory
If you love a person without loving God in him, i.e. goodness, then with such love you are preparing for yourself disappointment and suffering.
The one who says that he loves God but does not love his neighbor is deceiving people. The one who says that he loves his neighbor but does not love God is deceiving himself.
Only perfection is wholly worthy of love.
In order to experience perfect love, we must either ascribe perfection to an imperfect object of our love, or we must love perfection—i.e. God.
