The world is full of inspirational love quotes. Some are cheesy, some are overly sappy, and some have absolutely no meaning at all. (For example, "Loving you is like breathing – how can I stop?" Barf!)

However, if you wade through all the weak and shallow love quotes floating around the Internet, printed in books, and scribbled all over 7th grade girls' notebooks, you'll unearth several diamonds in the rough – inspiring, powerful, and gripping quotes that will change your perspective on love.

If you're lucky, you will have experienced different kinds of love in your lifetime. Love for your family, love for your significant other, love for your offspring, love for your pets, and love for the self. Each type of love is unique and different from the others.

The following 25 gripping, powerful, and memorable quotes will help you understand and embrace all kinds of conditional and unconditional love you could ever experience.

Family

People may not always tell you how they feel about you, but they will always show you. Pay attention.

The only way love can last a lifetime is if it's unconditional. The truth is this: love is not determined by the one being loved, but rather by the one choosing to love. – Stephen Kendrick, The Love Dare

If you judge people, you have no time to love them – Mother Teresa

Our brothers and sisters are there with us from the dawn of our personal stories to the inevitable dusk. – Susan Scarf Merrell

We will never know the love of a parent till we become parents ourselves. – Henry Ward Beecher

Significant other

We accept the love we think we deserve. – Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

We come to love not by finding a perfect person, but by learning to see an imperfect person perfectly. - Sam Keen

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable. – Bruce Lee

Offspring

Thank god for all I missed, because it led me here to this. - Darius Rucker

I want [my daughter] to grow up knowing that I was the first man ever to fall in love with her. I'd always thought the father/daughter thing was overstated. But I can tell you, sometimes, she looks at me and I just become a puddle. – Randy Pausch, The Last Lecture

Accept [your] children the way we accept trees – with gratitude, because they are a blessing – but do not have expectations or desires. You don't expect trees to change; you love them as they are. – Isabel Allende

Pets

Until one has loved an animal, a part of one's soul remains unawakened. – Anatole France

We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals. – Immanuel Kant

Give a dog your heart, and you'll get one in return.

If having a soul means being able to feel love, loyalty, and gratitude, then animals are better off than a lot of humans. – James Herriot

Those who wish to pet and baby wild animals "love" them. But those who respect their natures and wish to let them live normal lives, love them more. – Edwin Way Teale

Dogs have a way of finding the people who need them and filling an emptiness we didn't even know we had. – Thom Jones

There is no love like a pet's love.

The self

Be your own kind of beautiful.

Today you are you. That is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you. – Dr. Seuss

Loving yourself means not allowing other people's opinions of you to be more important than how you feel about yourself. – Stephany Crowley

Talk to yourself like you would to someone you love. – Brene Brown

Don't change so people will like you. Be yourself and the right people will love the real you.

To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance. – Oscar Wilde

Love yourself first and everything else falls into line. You really have to love yourself to get anything done in this world. –Lucille Ball

For quotes from the sad side of love go here.