"The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."
- William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

Blake's statement, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" presents two problems that undermine both its power and its significance.
The first derives from the meaning of the word, "excess". According to Webster's Third New International Dictionary, it represents either a quantitative measure ("a state of surpassing or going beyond limits: the fact of being in a measure beyond sufficiency, necessity, or duty") or a value judgment ("undue or immoderate indulgence: intemperance especially in eating and drinking"). As a quantitative measure, its meaning is amorphous unless the implicitly referenced limit or sufficiency is explicitly specified. "Excess" represents not a discrete state or fact in itself, but a comparison with some other quantity. Saying "excess" without specifying the reference is like saying "something is more" without specifying what it is more than. As a value judgment, "excess" suffers from the same amorphousness of meaning as it does as a quantitative measure. In fact, it is being employed again as an implicit comparison, except in this case the implicitly referenced limit is more clearly an arbitrary measure that has been defined according to the moral values of a particular reference group. In the moral context, "excess" means not only "more than" but also "bad". Use of "excess" in this way implies an acceptance of some group's morally determined definition of the term. And this in turn puts Blake in a double bind. Either he does not actually believe that what the moral reference group considers to be excessive is really excessive, in which case he is being dishonest with either his readers or himself: i.e., what he more properly should be saying (but more poetically) is something like, "what society judges to be excessive is in fact (not excessive but) the road to wisdom". Or he does actually embrace the moral reference group's definition of excess. In that case, he would seem to be saying that something that leads to wisdom is morally bad – which in turn implies either that wisdom itself is morally bad, or that the "excess" that leads to wisdom also produces something else that is so morally bad that its badness overshadows the goodness that wisdom entails. Blake probably would not endorse a belief that wisdom is morally bad. At the same time, if he believes that the excess that leads to wisdom produces significantly more moral badness than the wisdom is worth, the statement, "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" would be pointless, if not absurd. It would be similar to saying, "I can pay a hundred dollars for five-dollar drink."
The second problem with Blake's statement is more simple to consider:
Wisdom is not a destination but a mode of traveling. . . .

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