Maimonides' Laws of Repentance, having set out the mechanics of confession, abandonment, regret and resolve, goes on to distinguish repentance by its motive, a distinction the tradition traces to a much-cited Talmudic teaching (Yoma 86b) that repentance can transform a person's deliberate sins in two different ways depending on why they turned.
Teshuvah me-yirah, repentance out of fear, converts deliberate sins into unintentional ones: the wrongdoing is forgiven, but it retains a lesser moral weight, as though it had been done carelessly rather than in defiance. Teshuvah me-ahavah, repentance out of love, is described as converting deliberate sins into merits outright, so that the very act once counted against a person becomes, retrospectively, evidence in their favor, a genuinely startling claim that later commentators worked hard to explain rather than soften. The Talmud's illustration is that a person who repents from love should feel that the sin itself became an occasion for closeness to God rather than merely an erased debt.
The distinction reappears throughout Jewish ethical literature as a diagnostic for the quality of a person's religious life rather than a technical rule with practical legal consequences: fear-based repentance is treated as real, valid and sufficient for atonement, but love-based repentance is held up as the higher achievement, associated with the mature stages of religious development rather than the beginner's terror of punishment. Hasidic teaching in particular elaborated the love-based ideal, some masters holding that the deliberate sin, once transformed, becomes a source of spiritual strength precisely because the struggle to overcome it, unlike an unintentional lapse, engaged the whole person.