GPG's AES-256 symmetric encryption is believed to be as secure as it is difficult to
- guess the passphrase
- or compromise the machine used to perform encryption and decryption.
Guessing the passphrase should be harder if one uses
gpg --s2k-mode 3 --s2k-count 65011712 --s2k-digest-algo SHA512 --s2k-cipher-algo AES256
or equivalently puts in the gpg.conf file:
s2k-mode 3
s2k-count 65011712
s2k-digest-algo SHA512
s2k-cipher-algo AES256
These options increase (to about the maximum possible per the OpenPGP format) the amount of processing to transform a passphrase into a key, hence the resistance to brute-force passphrase search. This is not a substitute to using a hard-to-guess passphrase, but does help significantly.
When encrypting to self, it still makes a lot of sense to use asymmetric encryption: that allows to encrypt without a passphrase, limiting its possible leak to decryption. I use this for automated backups in the cloud (with a different asymmetric key to sign the backups). I can confidently say that nothing on the machines doing the backups allows to decipher the backups.