I’m deeply fond of weighty phrases – little snippets with cultural gravitas and mystical overtones. Most of my favorites have biblical origin or are fragments of culturally foundational art, remixed memetically over the centuries until they become units of their own. A few of my favorites:

• Not by bread alone
• A thousand and one nights
• All men are created equal
• That the strong might not injure the weak
• Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair
• One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind
• My brother’s keeper
• The truth will set you free
• A plague on both your houses
• Justice, justice you shall pursue

This quality of mystical weight is of course both culturally bound and listener dependent. “All men are created equal” works particularly well for me as an American; “justice, justice” as a Jew. But I think for best results, weighty phrases should be broadly understood: the magic happens in the shared context between listener and speaker. There are other phrases which feel hefty and almost-mystical to me because of the idiosyncratic things I like, but I don’t think they have enough broad cultural context and centuries of reuse to really become synecdoches. Consider:

• The crownless again shall be king (last line of Tolkien’s “not all who wander are lost” poem)
• I am a Jedi, like my father before me (from Return of the Jedi, and the best moment in Star Wars)
• Do or do not – there is on try (also from Star Wars, but perhaps borderline its own cultural element now?)
• We hold these truths to be self-evident (from the Declaration of Independence)

Non-phrases can also have a similar quality. For example, the time interval “a year and a day” recurs in various fictional and legal contexts. I first encountered a year in a day in the fantasy series Wheel of Time, which intentionally remixes real world legends; in one Wheel of Time’s cultures, prisoners of war are honor-bound to serve their captors for a year and a day before being released. Just super cool how this idea stitches together fiction, current legal practice, and centuries old common law to mean “the shortest long time.”