I personally prefere Symfony over Laravel just because I think they made more reasonable design decisions and implemented Patterns more accordingly to what I deem a good Decision.
Still Marco Alka made a good point about understanding Frameworks first as well as Oscar Diaz who made a good point about the timeline issue as well as other concerns like maintainability, specialization and longterm security support.
Laravel seems to be easier, that's why so many PHP people love it. just as a baseline
Symfony oriented itself on the Spring framework architecture (java), it is inspired by jinja (python) for their twig tpl language and Doctrine is a Data-mapper pattern which orients itself more along the line with Hybernate.
Laravel oriented itself more along the line of Ruby on Rails architecture (ruby), it uses Blade as default template language and it has Eloquent as an ORM which is as well Ruby oriented with an Active Record pattern.
I personally use phalcon, symfony, my own and yii as frameworks in PHP tried parts of CakePHP, Codeigniter as well and a lot of self tailored PHP-Frameworks.
Hence I cannot say anything about laravel besides a lot of people love it and all the talks in the usergroups about symfony and laravel have been great so far.
But to the real point, .... if possible I would always pick separated libraries over complete frameworks for my personal use.
j
stuff ;)