ask or not?

There is a saying 'Who asks is a fool for five minutes. Who does not is one forever.'

I wonder if that is true. If you regard only the level of information, the assumption might hold, supposing you could not have drawn it from other sources. However, I think there might be questions that leave you quite unprotected to people's judgment about you and they might get you wrong. So what makes a fool a fool? The fact of not knowing something or the fact that others take them for one?