let sleeping dogs lie

Attestations exist from the 1820s and 1830s. Earlier ones may be discoverable with better corpus searches. The metaphor is self-evident and is typical of folk wisdom. To choose to pass by a sleeping dog without stirring it is comparable to letting a hornets' nest or beehive be, not poking a bear, and so on.

• "Near-synonyms: let it be, leave it be, let things be, leave things be, let it alone, leave it alone, let things alone, leave things alone; let bygones be bygones, let nature take its course"
• "Eventually, they decided it would be best to let sleeping dogs lie and not discuss the matter any further."
• "A: I noticed a minor typo in the proofs just now, but I think they're already doing the make-ready on the press. B: Time to let sleeping dogs lie then."
• "But, leaving novelists alone, on the whole we find in real life that if speech is silvern, silence is essentially golden, and that more harm is done by saying too much than by saying too little; above all, that infinite mischief arises by not letting sleeping dogs lie."
• "Sometimes you just had to let stuff go. Endlessly rehashing old hurts just made things worse. It was far better, I'd learned, to let sleeping dogs lie."
• "Crystal might have said that those perfect lips were zipped, but the kidnappers had no way of knowing that. Should he let sleeping dogs lie?"

• let it be
• leave it be
• let things be
• leave things be
• let it alone
• leave it alone
• let things alone
• leave things alone
• ;
• let bygones be bygones
• let nature take its course

• let a sleeping dog lie
• let the sleeping dogs lie
• dogsleep
• dog sleep
• lie doggo
• agree to disagree
• benign neglect
• hands off
• sleeping giant